I was amazed at how fast my GPS PCBs arrived in the mail. Usually OSH Park takes a good 2 weeks to turn around a board. However, this time they arrived in 5 days. The boards look great...and they arrived just in time for the weekend! Read More...

I left off with my MEGA MINI boards not working. I was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out what went wrong. I figured I’d shelf it for a week and look at it again another day with a clear head. I posted my schematic on the Arduino forums and asked if someone could lend a second set of eyes and let me know if it made a stupid design error. It turned out I had .1uF caps on the crystal! Can you believe it?


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I had some Christmas cash that was burning a hole in my pocket. I decided to hop on SparkFun and see if there were any goodies to be had. I already needed a few things for some upcoming projects, so I figured I'd try and see if I could get my order up to $60 bucks so that I'd qualify for free shipping. Read More...

After a 2-week wait, my MEGA MINI PCBs arrived in the mail. They turned out pretty cool. I assembled two of them and installed Atmega Studio on my PC. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to write the bootloader to them. I was able to read one of the chips, but after a quick lunch break, it stopped working. I hope I didn’t kill $36 bucks worth of Atmega2560s!
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I’d hate to spend a good $40 bucks on the PCB for my GPS clock and find out that I screwed something up, or that I can’t solder an Atmega2560. I figured that I’d spare myself the possibility of wasting $100 bucks worth of hardware and chalk up a mini-board for the Atmega2560. Sort of a “bare bones” MEGA as a test-run. Read More...