Problem with oscillator?

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi all,

I have been trying to build a circuit for controlling the light at my front door. I built a prototype with an Arduino and bread board which worked great. Moving it onto veroboard and it no longer operates. So I pulled the ATMEGA chip out and put it back into the Arduino board, then connected wires to my veroboard, it worked! So that leaves me to assume that the something on the board isn't right. I checked all the voltages are at the correct pins etc and it all looks okay (RESET is held high via a resistor). The only thing I can think of is the oscillator isn't working, however I have no idea how to check that is the case or not. I used this site as a guide to to the pinout.

Is there a way to check if the oscillator is working or is there anything else I need to check?

And if anyone wants to know, I need it to be on a custom board as I don't have the space to house the Arduino and additional circuitry :wink:

Thanks!!

2

You make life easy on yourself and buy a RBBB or similar (or just its circuit board), or borrow the open source circuit for it.

http://shop.moderndevice.com/products/rbbb-kit

I've built several veroboard 'arduinos' using its circuit, all of them worked.

3

Cheers for that idea, but even that would make it a bit too big

To add another twist, I have taken the chip out of the circuit and put it into a breadboard. I then linked the pins from the breadboard into the IC Socket on the circuit. It works! However put the IC back into the socket directly and it stops working :expressionless: It is something to do with the 328 sitting into the socket that is the problem and I am not sure what else to look for (have done shorts, dry joints etc).

As they say a picture is worth a thousand words! In this image the circuit works:

383×640 42.2 KB

But as above, if I move the chip back into its socket it doesn't work. :~