I’ve finished assembling my little gadget…and it works! As a side note, Flux is super handy, it made soldering the tiny SMT stuff really easy, also I learned a few tips from this video.

I ran into one small problem: on the board, I added a JTAG port for in-circuit programming & debugging. However, my cheapo JTAGICE mkI (not mkII) doesn’t support the newer AVR chip I put on the board. So I had to hack in an ICSP port, hence the four ugly green wires coming out of the middle of the board. But once I got that in, I updated the program I had running on the prototype. There were just some minor changes, IO pins were mapped differently, and the syntax for using Timers was slightly changed.

Now that the hardware is essentially done, I need to write some more software, get a few polished minigames on there.

UPDATE: Please enter your email address, I’m trying to find out if there’s any interest in these devices. If enough people subscribe, it will encourage me to do something about it

You can download a short video, or watch it online here:

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Over the christmas holiday I received my PCBs back from Olimex. They look very professionally made, it’s pretty neat knowing that I designed it completely myself. In the picture to the right you can see the board with a few of the components. I haven’t started soldering yet, but I’ve placed them on there so you can get an idea of how it will look when finished.

I’m waiting on the parts from Allegro before I can finish, I’ve requested samples of their surface mount pieces (previously I only got the ones in the DIP packages).