Ep. 06: From Breadboard to Field Test - Debugging, Enclosures & First Data

This week on Build, Create & Learn – A Maker’s Journey, I took a big step forward: moving my drone telemetry logger off the breadboard and into a real enclosure.

It wasn’t smooth sailing. Desoldering headers damaged some pads, wiring bugs kept piling up, and I spent hours chasing errors from the SD card, BME280, and GPS module. But after rerouting pins and rewriting code, I finally got the system logging properly again.

The real payoff? A short car test drive that produced my first dataset — GPS coordinates, speed, and altitude — all saved to the SD card. I visualized the track in JupyterLabs with Folium and GPX Studio, and it was incredibly satisfying to see the results line up with reality.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

• Why moving from breadboard to wires is never as easy as it looks
• The lessons I learned from desoldering headers and torn pads
• Debugging SD card, BME280, and GPS issues one by one
• Designing and 3D printing my first enclosure box
• Logging real data on a short test drive (instead of a flight)
• Visualizing GPS tracks and speed data in Jupyter
• Next steps: battery indicators, antennas, and the first drone flight

This episode is about more than just wiring and code — it’s about perseverance, learning from mistakes, and celebrating the moment when raw numbers turn into meaningful data.

🎧 Listen now and let’s keep building, creating, and learning — together!