the brains OK, but the eyes are gone :-)

Wasted a bit of precious time today trying to find why my arduino chip did nothing when plugged into a board I have made as an interface ( I have used the same pcb before with no problems )

What threw me was the 78L05 on the board was getting hot , which wasted a lot of my time looking for shorts.

It turned out that one of the two tiny 22Pf caps on the crystal was marked 22J and the other 221 ( 220pF ! )

They both came from my same draw, so I dont know when the rogue one got there.
I will now keep my magnifying glass nearby, and accept my age !

Or pick up a set of (expensive) Smart Tweezers and check everything before soldering it on:

I've taken to not keeping loose parts around anymore, for this very reason. Unless it's in original packaging with a label and part number, in the trash it goes. It's just not worth keeping around loose parts (given how inexpensive they are) for the potential of wasting hours debugging.

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The MegaRAM shield: add 128 kilobytes of external RAM to your Arduino Mega/Mega2560

Rugged, you realize you could sort them? Take an afternoon (or 10) to sort them into drawers

Started doing that once, and found it took X seconds to sort a part, leading to an hourly "rate" of $Y per hour, and realized that Y was disgustingly small. Sadly, that hour is best spent doing other things and just buying new parts as necessary.

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Beat707: MIDI drum machine / sequencer / groove-box for Arduino

Well, yea

Send those parts to me :stuck_out_tongue:

(also, you could start sorting as you buy, that way you just dump baggie A into Bin A)

I wish I had the space to sort, right now I have two boxes that I dump everything in...