1. I've been focused on building an Arduino over the last couple of weeks. Difficulties have arisen (primarily due to the small size of the traces for the 328 chip):
a) I attempted to use heat paste on the first iteration, which was a pain to apply. I then overheated the board and melted the plastic backing.
b)
The second iteration, which involved me soldering the chip on, has
adamantly refused to work. The bootloader loaded fine, but all
attempts to program the board were met with "stk_500 programmer
not responding" errors.
2.
Once I milled and stuffed my third Arduino and reinstalled the
Arduino IDE on my computer, it flashed fine. It is now totally
functional and is running my final project (see that page.)
