Learning from my Previous Hardware Issues

This week's assignment was to program the ATTINY44 micro-controller board that we made during the previous Electonic Design week assignment. There are two ways, I know, of doing it:

1. With an avrISP.
2. With the fabISP board that we made in the second week.

When connected properly, my board's LED light was on but unprogrammable. I found out that I'd drawn the traces way too close in Eagle schematic that Modela's endmill wouldn't be able to carve the parth out.

Chris Malcolm, my studiomate, also encountered similar problem, so, for the second time, we updated our files and milled our boards together again.

New Board Programmed with both avrISP + fabISP

The new board works well and, most importantly, programmable! I tried both using Arduino and C to program the micro-controller. I'm a bit pressed for time, but I'm going to upload a couple of videos to show what I tried out.

A few quick notes from my observation:
- Switching between AVRisp and FABisp could be problematic, e.g. errors of not finding USB Device occurred a few times.
- My MAC experience was that the LED dimmed out or not responding properly when programmed through fabISP. I'm wondering if we need higher resistor value for the LED, e.g. 1K instead of 499 Ohms.
- I found out that my FTDI Ground connection sometimes are interchangeable.
- Which computer's ports you use do matter.

Blinking LED

Switch On + Off

Fading In + Out