Explore the board
Welcome to Chatter's anatomy guide!
Whether you have already assembled your Chatter or not, this is going to be a helpful guide where you’ll learn a bit more about the soldered components, small connections, and drivers.
We'll start with bigger components and cover smaller components later in the guide.
Exploring the board
Starting with anything else but the PCB board itself would be wrong. Therefore, we present you the star of the night...
PCB stands for a printed circuit board. This fiberglass board has copper traces, protective paint, and insulating material.
PCB stands for a printed circuit board. This fiberglass board has copper traces, protective paint, and insulating material.
Thanks to all the copper lead on the board, all the connected or soldered components can communicate with each other.
Without it, a buzzer wouldn't be able to vibrate once you receive a text message, the display wouldn’t react after any input, and you wouldn't be able to write a message using the pushbuttons.
Just like with other CircuitMess devices like Nibble or Spencer, we want our components not only to work wonders but to look cool as well! Therefore, we designed some pretty fun patterns that you can see on the back of the board.
ESP-WROOM-32
This microcontroller runs everything, and you could say that this is Chatter’s brain. ESP-WROOM-32 is a powerful module mainly used for sound encoding and streaming music. It is reasonably priced considering all its abilities.
Apart from being famous for sound encoding, ESP-WROOM-32 also controls pictures on the display and pushbuttons.
Due to its complexity and sensitivity, this module is already connected to Chatter's main board.
Reset button
This one’s pretty self-explanatory - the reset button is used for resetting the whole mix table. You can find this useful in case something gets frozen (which is hopefully never) or if your Chatter turns off due to battery saving program.
USB-C connector
This connector on the top side of the board is used for charging and connecting Chatter to the computer. Once you connect it to your PC, you’ll be able to program it in CircuitBlocks - a graphical programming interface that helps newbies get into embedded programming.
Display
Chatter’s display is connected to its own small board that is soldered to the main board. There are no pins that need to be soldered (unlike on our other devices), but only a small orange tape that needs to be connected to the main board.
Don’t worry! Guides that explain this step are quite simple, so we hope you’ll actually enjoy the process of assembling the device together.
On this display, you’ll be able to see text messages you'll receive, all the settings, and cool features that you'll be able to program in CircuitBlocks a bit later.
Buttons
These buttons allow you to navigate through Chatter's menu, write and send messages, and so much more!
