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brickwalden@xxxxxxxxx writes:
>Hello,
>I'm working on a little project with a PIC microcontroller and I think
>that I might be overheating the chip when I solder it. Everything works
>perfectly on a breadboard, but I've tried soldering everything up and
>gotten the same result twice.
>There is just an input switch and an output LED that is supposed to
>react in a very certain way to the switch. Once I solder everything up
>the LED just lights whenever the switch is down. I've looked for any
>sort of solder bridge that might be connecting the switch directly to
>the LED but I don' think that this is the problem. I'm just wondering
>if this sounds like something that a PIC that has been overheated might
>do. I guess that I sort of imagined them just not reacting to any
>inputs, but probably I'm wrong.
>Brick
Decades ago there was an author, back in the earlier days if
microprocessors, that wrote several books on hardware debugging,
unfortunately I can't remember his name at the moment.
One of his ideas was called the "static stimulus tester." This
was a little project board that you would spend a lot of time
carefully building up. It had debounced switches and leds on
it. And it plugged into your microprocessor socket. What it
would let you do is observe the inputs and generate outputs a clock
edge at a time if need be, it was static. With that he showed
how this little gadget would point out many of the little errors
that we all seem to make. Making one of those for a PIC should
not be a difficult task.
Perhaps for your little project you could do this or a smaller
subset of this to help diagnose the problem.
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