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Smoke my sausages Batman!
I've been working to get my new game score keeping device up and running in time for the Brighton and Hove Petanque tournament this Sunday. I'd coded it up pretty quickly, but when it came to saving the results to EEPROM, I quickly discovered not just the limit of the available memory, but the program limit of the 16F628A. I'd filled up my allocated 2k of program memory and still had about 40-50 lines of code left to go!
A bit of jiggery-pokery and some sub-routine optimisations and I managed to squeeze the entire code down to just 1600 words (but sacrificed some nice bits in order to get it working).
I was keen to see it working in hardware and dumped it all to a chip.
I plugged it into the breadboard and fired it up.
Nothing.
Zilch.
Zero.
Nada.
Then something.
A small wisp of smoke.
Then a lot of smoke. Holy crap! I'd plugged the micro in upside down, forcing 5v onto its ground pins and driving the 5v low. It's been a long while since I've done that. But it goes to show that even when you think you know what you're doing, there's no room for complacency! I could have fried my USB port just now.
Thankfully the only thing I lost was a cheap 99p microchip!
A bit of jiggery-pokery and some sub-routine optimisations and I managed to squeeze the entire code down to just 1600 words (but sacrificed some nice bits in order to get it working).
I was keen to see it working in hardware and dumped it all to a chip.
I plugged it into the breadboard and fired it up.
Nothing.
Zilch.
Zero.
Nada.
Then something.
A small wisp of smoke.
Then a lot of smoke. Holy crap! I'd plugged the micro in upside down, forcing 5v onto its ground pins and driving the 5v low. It's been a long while since I've done that. But it goes to show that even when you think you know what you're doing, there's no room for complacency! I could have fried my USB port just now.
Thankfully the only thing I lost was a cheap 99p microchip!
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