Hi,
I'm pretty new and was putting together a kit around the ATMega328P (Sparkfun's Simon SMT kit, yes the page says it's 168, but they shipped a 328 and it's identical PCB artwork to the pre-assembled kit featuring the 328). Wanted to try SMT soldering and, after much difficulty, I hobbled it together.
Among assembly notes, I tried spot soldering and drag soldering and left a mess of bridges in both cases. Pulled out the solder wick and to fix it and it looked pretty good, although I'm pretty concerned that there was so much solder to sop up that I kept my iron on it too long.
Tried programming with a known good programmer (got a basic hello world blinking LED working on a breadboard with the ATTiny13), but was surprised when I tried programming this kit and got the following:
avrdude: Device signature = 0x000000
avrdude: Yikes! Invalid device signature.
Double check connections and try again, or use -F to override
this check.
I've done continuity checks on the board going from the chip to everywhere it connects to and it looks like, electrically, everything's the way it ought to be. Which brings me here instead of the forums there:
A) How tough are these little chips? Did I burn it out? Is there a way I can test that it's operational even though it doesn't have code on it?
B) The updated product page says the chip is preloaded with "Arduino Pro Mini bootloader". Could that be messing me up? I like to consider myself a pretty strong software guy and I'd like to start on the ground floor before using the shortcuts the Arduino environment provides.
Thanks in advance!
[/url]
