software I attempted not to break: iterm
hardware I attempted not to break: mill, soldering station, isp, laptop
----milling----
First we learned how to use the mill to make the isp board. We were taught to be careful of the end mills because they can break super easily and to make sure that the end mill is in contact with the material. Mine actually worked out perfectly on the first try, which was awesome.
After creating the board, it was time to solder the pieces on. This was slightly terrifying, and it took me a while to actually start soldering the components on. Once I started, though, everything seemed to work out fairly easily. My soldering is definitely not the cleanest - there are places where it's pretty bumpy and uneven, but the board at least seems to be working.
Soldering was terrifying, but trying to program my ISP ended up being the most obnoxious part of this project. Following along with the tutorial, I tried running 'make' in my directory, but got the error "make: avr-gcc: No such file or directory". After searching around on google and the course website, I discovered that I had to change my .bash_profile to include the CrossPack directory - I think a previous project I've done was causing an error in pathing. So I edited my .bash_profile to include this, activated the changed profile, and tried rerunning make this time.
It worked! Then everything else worked as stated, until I tried the final step. For some reason, when trying to blow the reset fuse, it kept saying initialization had failed. A few other people in my section had also gotten this error, so I tried to do what they had done to fix it. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and after a few hours I had to leave studio so I wasn't able to figure out what had happened.
Update: I came back to lab a few days later and essentially just tried everything again using the same board and it worked! I think I had just screwed something up on my laptop...the board works now as a programmer so I'm guessing it was a software problem.