Hi guys. Would anyone be more electrically inclined than me and tell me what stupid mistake I'm doing here?
Looking to wire these wall mounted letters with LEDs. My wife bought a few and instead of taking them off the wall to turn them off/on, I want to hook them all up to a breadboard with buttons. Preferably 1 letter per GPIO pin if possible, but I have yet to measure the current that these things draw so for now I just want to wire one as a proof-of-concept.
But I'm stuck wondering what I'm doing wrong. I can't even wire one letter directly to the Pi. Here is a photo of what I've got:
![Image]()
Yellow wire is 3.3V, green is ground. Yellow wire is soldered directly to the battery slot, green wire is soldered to the dummy battery since I can't solder to the spring itself. What doesn't make any sense is how I can remove the dummy battery and use a dupont jumper wire and manually touch it between ground on the Pi and the spring and the light works, but when the dummy battery is inserted it doesn't work.
It seems to have something to do with the + end of the dummy battery. When it makes contact with the soldered yellow wire the circuit stops working I think. Why is that? If I take the + end out and hold the other end of the dummy battery against the spring it still works. How am I supposed to hook this up? Preferably while being able to fully insert the dummy batteries so that they don't stick out of the back. I tried to Google for similar projects or just in general how to wire dummy batteries for Pi but all I get are results on how to run the PI off a battery, not using the Pi to power something that takes batteries.
Looking to wire these wall mounted letters with LEDs. My wife bought a few and instead of taking them off the wall to turn them off/on, I want to hook them all up to a breadboard with buttons. Preferably 1 letter per GPIO pin if possible, but I have yet to measure the current that these things draw so for now I just want to wire one as a proof-of-concept.
But I'm stuck wondering what I'm doing wrong. I can't even wire one letter directly to the Pi. Here is a photo of what I've got:
Yellow wire is 3.3V, green is ground. Yellow wire is soldered directly to the battery slot, green wire is soldered to the dummy battery since I can't solder to the spring itself. What doesn't make any sense is how I can remove the dummy battery and use a dupont jumper wire and manually touch it between ground on the Pi and the spring and the light works, but when the dummy battery is inserted it doesn't work.
It seems to have something to do with the + end of the dummy battery. When it makes contact with the soldered yellow wire the circuit stops working I think. Why is that? If I take the + end out and hold the other end of the dummy battery against the spring it still works. How am I supposed to hook this up? Preferably while being able to fully insert the dummy batteries so that they don't stick out of the back. I tried to Google for similar projects or just in general how to wire dummy batteries for Pi but all I get are results on how to run the PI off a battery, not using the Pi to power something that takes batteries.
Statistics: Posted by RYoder97 — Thu May 23, 2024 8:40 pm