Wiring The Buttons and Switches
This is arguably going to be the hardest, if not most fiddly part of the project. It's up to you how much patience you have for doing this correctly, so you can bodge it (like I have) or properly solder the wires and everything together.
My wiring ended up looking like this, but yours will probably look a lot cleaner (especially if you have soldered)
Each individual button / switch will need to have a breadboard wire connected to it individually, which will hook into the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins (we will go over in detail later), but we will also need ground wires. The raspberry pi doesn't have enough ground pins for 19 switches / buttons so we will group the buttons and switches up four the ground wire.
We will need one ground wire for each of the following groups:
- The top 5 buttons (that are level with the LCD screen)
- The middle 5 buttons
- The four protected switches
- The five bottom switches
I know the above diagram is messy, but try and use it as a rough guide along with these instructions to check whether you have wired everything correctly.
We will go over how these wires connect to the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins in the next article