SOLVED. The caps I was using for the clocks were the wrong value, fixed it, works fine.
I bought one of these: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10524 and built the circuit around it on a breadboard to try it out. The power works fine, multimeter gives me 5V out where it’s supposed to, no shorts, etc. I use a CA-42 for USB to serial interfacing and it works fine (loopback gives me what I should get). The microcontroller itself, however, has issues I think, and I want to be able to make sure it’s misbehaving before I get a replacement.
Apparently, the LED connected to D13 should blink when it receives the reset signal (which also works–pressing the pushbutton pulls the node low), which has never happened so far. I thought nothing of it, and tried to use the IDE to load the blink example to test it. I’ve been troubleshooting for several hours, and have tried many different things (checking COM ports, changing the timing on pressing reset, resistors on the Tx/Rx pins, etc.), but no dice. All the output I get is this:
Using Port : \\.\COM34
Using Programmer : arduino
Overriding Baud Rate : 115200
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Send: 0 [30] [20]
avrdude: Recv:
avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude done. Thank you.
I’m thinking either the bootloader wasn’t actually on it or the chip is dead (which means I need a replacement). I’ll see if I can get access to an official board to test it on, but what else can I do to pinpoint the issue?