PCB's are in!!!

    The circuit boards are in and I've partially assembled them. The weather forecast is predicting a top 10 worst snow storm for the D.C. area. I was sent home early from work because of the paranoia. Having grown up in Montana I'm not scared by any amount of snow. Let's see how the weather was when I started the assembly...

 

    Below you can see the circuit board, my soldering iron, and some bread. Bread...never solder without it! Seeing as my kitchen counter tops are the only solder resistant surfaces in the apartment that's where I decided to work. I've decided to put on the two ATmega128 micros, their crystals, and the programming headers. With those components on the board I should be able to load a program into the micros and set the fuses to use the external crystals.

 

     When I hooked the board up to my STK600 for programming I couldn't get a connection. I checked through the schematics, took some measurements with my multimeter, and retried several times. Since I had no luck there I decided the STK600 may not be providing enough power through the ISP cable so I soldered on the regulators and battery connector. I connected the battery and measured all the voltage rails. Everything looked good, so I tried the programming again... Still no luck. My thoughts now are that the micros have not been completely soldered to the board. Since they are the QFN style package with a very tiny bit of pin showing it is extremely hard to solder properly. Seeing as I don't have a microscope it's even harder. I may wait until Monday and use the hot air rework station at work...after hours of course.

    Now, about four hours after I started assembling and pretty close to when my work day should have ended...

     This tiny amount of snow wouldn't have stopped even the most timid of D.C. drivers, but I'm happy to have an early Friday off so I could work on the balloon computer and share the progress with you. Maybe tomorrow will include a revelation on my microcontroller programming problems.