First, I want to say Sparkfun Electronics is one of the best places to buy hobbiest components and modules. The products are excellent, the forums are excellent, and the staff is excellent. I have bought a lot of stuff from Sparkfun so I feel I can comment on this.
I spent 3 days trying to figure out why I couldn’t interface a compact flash to my Atmega128. When I tried to read the STATUS or ERROR registers, I would read in values that made no sense whatsoever (I.E. bit 1 in the STATUS register should always be 0 but I was always reading a 1). I triple checked all of my wiring and made sure all of my components were following proper timing. I also have SRAM on the same address, data, and address decoder and it was working flawlessly.
You see, I had purchased and used the CF Slim breakout board from Sparkfun to interface my CF to my Atmega128. I assumed it was not the culprit because you would expect a premade board to be good. Infact, it was not. Several of the pins on the surface mount CF socket had cold solder joints. I used a magnifying glass and a tiny eye glass screw driver to check each pin. I found atleast 5 pins were not soldered. One of them happened to be D1 which explains why I always read 1 for bit 1 (floating pin). I have no idea what the other pins were but that does not matter.
So I plugged in my soldering iron and spent a few minutes resoldering the pins using the solder braid technique I learned from Sparkfun. I tried it again and voila! It works! I can now send the Identify command (0xEC) and see valid data!
This was not the first time this has happened to me. About a year ago, I purchased a few ET301 SiRF III eval boards from Sparkfun. Two of them (out of 6) did not work! I used my trusty multimeter and found the SiRF III GPS unit had cold solder joints. I simply resoldered them and they worked fine.
I know it is not easy to mass produce boards, especially since you guys do the soldering by hand. I guess all I am saying is there should be better quality assurance on your part, Sparkfun. You have an excellent thing going here. The bigger you get, the more quality is expected from you.
I am still a very happy customer and you can still expect a lot more business from me. I just hope that in the future, when my circuits are not working properly, that it was my bad and not the Sparkfun branded product.
I hope there is no offense taken by this post. This is just some criticism that I hope is taken positively.
Nullz