I’m following along with the tutorials (I just got all my stuff, w00t). I’m on this one: [tutorial 2 and I’m trying to program my chip.
When I plug everything in, there is a distinct smell that I have heard many people describe as the “radioshack” smell. I’m hoping this is normal, but anyway, it appears as if my ATmega168 is not responding. I followed all the check procedures, checked my wiring, checked that both VCC and Grounds are connected, made sure my port was set correctly in the makefile. I installed the giveio.sys thing and ran the batch file.
I don’t know what’s wrong. Can anyone possibly give me a way to test some more stuff and narrow down the possible cause of the problem?
There’s the new electronics smell and then there’s the “we vaporized something we shouldn’t have” smell. Usually, the latter is accompanied with smoke and is much worse than the new electronics smell.
Anyway - here’s a tip: before powering up any new circuit, use your multimeter to check resistance between power and ground without the actual power supply connected. You can expect to get a low value or a value that seems to creep upward over time. If you get 0 (and I mean 0.000 ohms), you have a short circuit somewhere and should not power it up until you’ve re-checked all of your wiring. If you get infinity, you probably forgot to connect something to power or ground. It’s a simple test that has saved me on many occasions.
Back to your original question, did you see any smoke when you powered it up, either from the breadboard itself or your power supply? If not, I wouldn’t assume anything is fried. In the worst case, you may have a defective part. Double check your wiring against the datasheet that goes with the chip you’re using - different chips tend to put the programming pins in different locations.
You need to contact SFE before returning it. If you order another one immediately to save time they might credit you with the price of the faulty one when they have checked it. It’s worth trying.
Most suppliers here in the UK (RS and Farnell spring to mind) will immediately send a replacement for a faulty item, without waiting for it to be returned.
Signal7, I’ll grab a multimeter and check my power rails. As far as the datasheet and the wiring, I already did that last night. I actually went to atmel’s website and found it, just to be sure. Also, I did not see any smoke or smell “fire” per se, just that strange “radioshack” odor.
Leon, I’m going to try and make sure that it’s not me one more time and then I’ll call them, thank you.