Some needed closure to appease my soldering demons

So, I am writing this during week 18, but since it’s related to electronics production, I am putting it here, for the enjoyment of the reader.

Burning the master programmer board and redoing it all again

So this week (Week 18), I accidentally destroyed the board that I created in week 4.

Yes! The one that took me 4 days to create and solder.

That same board that made me consider moving far away from electronics, and spend the remainder of my life meditating about the futility of SMD components that are too small for humans to handle and manipulate.

This picture recreates the configuration that injected the deadly 12V from the main board to the master programmer.

The power surge that ended it all came from a 12V power source that I accidentally connected to the board’s JTAG pins.

The good news is that:

• the board died painlessly.
  • The power-indicator LED lit up brighter than 1000 suns for a split second, and then it turned off forever.
• The power surge fried:
  1. the microcontroller (which cannot handle voltages beyond 3V3)
  2. the power LED (rated for 2V2 max)
  3. and the voltage regulator, since it received voltage through its output pin (which they do not normally appreciate)
• Replacing the affected components seemed to fix the issue, and I was able to interface with it for a couple more times, but it eventually stopped working.

Given the flaky behaviour it was displaying, I decide to mill another one.

Closing thoughts

One of the highlights of the course was seeing how much I have learned over the last 10 weeks:

What used to take 4 days, 2 mental breakdowns and 2 sad walks home (feeling defeated and with small burns on my fingers) now took barely 2h30 end to end (milling, soldering, flashing with a bootloader, …) and felt like a gigantic success.

I am still far from it, but someday, I hope to be as awesome as Dhanu.

Thanks, Dhanu for always being by my side and showing me all the tips and tricks to get better at it.