With the enclosure finished, the next step is to wire everything together, as so far, most components have either been used individually or were connected using a breadboard: a more permanent solution is required.

Proto Board

Because there are different components requiring the same pins (5V, GND, I2C), a prototyping HAT was used to provide multiple connections. The board was cut in such a way that one row of 90° male headers pins could be soldered on to make connections. On the bottom side, adjacent pins were connected, creating different groups, each associated with a certain GPIO pin.

The required connections are:

I used some leftover LED leads I cut off to make the connections on the proto board

Colour Coding

To facilitate the identification of wires and possible troubleshooting, colour coded wires were used.

In the wiring below, the following colours were used:

• GREEN: I2C SDA
• YELLOW: I2C SCL
• RED: +5V
• BLACK: GND
• PURPLE: button
• WHITE/GREY/BROWN: I2S Audio

To keep things removable, female Dupont wires were used. Since these are off the shelf wires, they are a bit too long, but there is enough space inside the enclosure to fit everything.

PWR & ACT LEDs

A thing to pay attention to with this semi transparent enclosure, are the red and green glows created by the Pi's activity and power LEDs. In the dark, they manage to shine through the white acrylic. There is a method to disable these LEDs in software, which is the preferred option, but it doesn't seem to work (yet?) for the power LED on the Pi 3: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=91&t=149126

Turning off the activity LED works though, and can be done as follows:

pi@piclock:~ $ sudo nano /boot/config.txt

# Disable the ACT LED
dtparam=act_led_trigger=none
dtparam=act_led_activelow=off

As a workaround, until a software solution is available for the power LED, I used a little piece of tape to mask the LED in a non-permanent way. For a permanent solution, a dab of nail polish could be used.

A single piece of tape wasn't enough to stop the light from shining through (those things are bright!), so I ended up adding four layers of tape to cover the LED!

The light can no longer shine through, and the other components don't have any power/activity LEDs either. The only light shining is now the white light from the 7-segment display, the LED matrix and the button

Testing

To test the wiring, I ran the different scripts controlling the various components: everything worked as expected. In the pictures below, I'm testing different weather icons: sun and rain. It's hard to take decent pictures due to the brightness (more blurred on the pictures than it actually is), but looks great in real life, slightly diffused by the acrylic.

Wiring: complete!

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