I jumped on the crypto bandwagon awhile back and for fun, wanted to build a cryptocurrency analog meter to gauge how much money I was losing every day. Using my past experience with the 8266 chips in my LED Cloud project, I thought this would be EASY. Not the case, it seems. As usual, working with the 8266 is always troubling and takes much longer than expected.
I used some Switec X27 steppers, and breakout board from Propwash Sims. The X27s are standard steppers used in most car dashboards for speedometers, etc. I had a bunch of these lying around from one of my flight simulator projects. That was the easy part, connecting to the 8266 was very simple. The goal was to set min/max limits which would represent the current value of the cryptocurrency, which varied quite a bit from the various coins.
I designed the case using Adobe Ilustrator to design the case and cut it using a Glowforge. It took a couple tries to get it right, but turned out pretty well. I stained it, which ended up being too dark, making the engraved text difficult to read. Next time I make cases or panels, I plan to use a different technique.
For programming, I used the base code example from the CoinMarketCap API examples and modified it to control the steppers. Although it worked perfectly for a few days, something changed and it stopped working. After many revisions I finally gave up. So this project is currently sitting on a shelf until I get some time to fix it.
