Hey guys,

Last time I talked to you I was struggling to burn a bootloader onto a blank atmega328p-au chip. My guess was that the connections on the FR1 board that I had milled out were bad, particularly the ones on the crystal. I tested this hypothesis this week by creating the same circuit on a breadboard, using a through hole version of the crystal I was previously using and a FR4 version of a tqfp32 breakout ( I keep destroying the traces on the FR1 boards when I solder). The whole situation ended up looking something like this;

So, in the end, I finally did get the bootloader onto the blank chip. This would seem to support the idea that the previous problems were related to poor soldering on my part rather than poor engineering on my part, what a relief.

With that, I felt confident enough in my design to finally order boards from OSHPark, which should arrive next week!

Till Next Time,

-Eric