Note: The following photos will show a silver slide switch, but the same steps apply to the Adafruit black slide switches.

Prepare the power slide switch

 

Cut one of the side legs, and shorten the remaining two legs. Tin the legs, tin the wires, and solder them together. Cover with heat shrink tubing.

Prepare the LiPo backpack

 

Cut the copper trace between the two holes next to the mounting hole. This will allow us to attach the slide switch that will act as a power switch.

Solder 3 ribbon wires to the through-holes for 5V, BAT and GND. The length of the ribbon wires can be about 5cm.

Prepare the USB MicroB port

 

Solder 5 ribbon wires onto all 5 through-holes. The length of the ribbon wires can be around 6cm.

Combine the ground wires

 

Carefully identify the GND wires for both the USB microB port and the LiPo backpack, twist them together, and dab a bit of solder to secure.

Solder combined GND wires plus resistor to ItsyBitsy

 

Take the combined GND wires and fit them into GND of the ItsyBitsy. Before soldering, fit a 1M resistor or higher into GND as well, and put the other end of the resistor through D11.

Do not solder on D11 yet.

BAT and 5V from the LiPo backpack connects to BAT and USB of the ItsyBitsy respectively. Solder these connections.

Solder USB MicroB's ID to ItsyBitsy's D11

 

Carefully identify which wire from the MircoB port is connected to ID, and solder that into the ItsyBitsy's D11 together with the resistor.

This resistor is important to be able to use the brass shape as a capacitive touch button.

Solder remaining 3 wires from microB port

 

Carefully identify the wires, and connect:

  • microB port's 5V to ItsyBitsy's VHi
  • microB port's D- to ItsyBitsy's A1
  • microB port's D+ to ItsyBitsy's A2

Once all the wires are soldered, connect the battery to the LiPo backpack and test to see that the green light on the ItsyBitsy turns on. 

Now, turn off your soldering iron, find some fresh air away from any lingering fumes, and take a deep breath. You've come quite far in this journey, I'm proud of you. :D

Before we move on with final case assembly, we should setup and load the CircuitPython code into the ItsyBitsy so that we can test and make sure that all our soldered connections work before we stuff everything inside an enclosure!

This guide was first published on Dec 22, 2020. It was last updated on Dec 22, 2020.

This page (ItsyBitsy + Power wiring) was last updated on Dec 09, 2020.

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