Wiring with Battery Charging Support
This wiring method is slightly more complicated but may make your campfire easier to use and maintain.
We'll add an on/off switch and a LiPoly backpack charger. This means you can recharge your campfire's batteries the same way you'd charge your phone -- by simply plugging it into a USB charger. Hooray!
Just like with option 1, get out the male connector you cut from the end of your Dotstars.
Strip about 1/8" of shielding from each wire. With your soldering iron, neatly and delicately "tin" each wire with just a tiny amount of solder. This will keep the wires from getting frayed and fuzzy and make it a little easier to fit them into the Pro Trinket's holes.
Solder the green wire into hole 10, and the yellow wire into hole 9.
It's a bit of a tight fit, and you may need to reduce the tin solder or trim the wires a bit, but they will fit (so don't give up).
Then, flip the Pro Trinket over and add some solder to tin the + and - pads on the back (intended for the JST battery connector). Solder the red and black wires firmly onto these pads.
With a utility knife, carefully scratch the copper lead between the two switch pads on the LiPoly backpack.
Strip a little shielding from each of your switch leads and solder the two wires into these two holes. It doesn't matter which wire goes into which hole.
On the back of the LiPoly backpack, bridge these two pads with a dot of solder. This allows faster charging with batteries over 500 mAh capacity such as we’re using here.
Solder the header that came with your LiPoly backpack into the remaining 3 holes from below. The easiest way to do this is using a solderless breadboard to help hold the pins in place.
Then, place the LiPoly backpack header pins into the Pro Trinket's Bat, G, and Bus holes (line up the G pin on the Pro Trinket with the one on the charger to be sure you've got this right). Solder the headers into place. Trim off any extra header that's sticking up.
Plug your LiPoly battery into the JST connector on the backpack, and plug your Dotstars into the Dotstar connector. Click the on/off switch and watch your firey lights burn!
If the lights are dim or don't come on, double check all your wiring and make sure there are no fuzzy wires shorting across any pins. If you can't find anything wrong, check out the troubleshooting tips under option 1.
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