A nice fry up

"There is no perfection, only beautiful versions of brokenness."

Shannon L. Alder

People can be very disparaging about Chinese manufacturing (usually without checking their labels), but we've found this amazing country to be simply outstanding in the electronics milieu - reliable, well priced and very innovative. Most of our electronics blogging has been about success and only occasionally do things go wrong from the manufacturing end, and so we note that the following is a rare occurrence and is not indicative our experiences to date.

Recently we took delivery of one of our new favourite chips (when will it end?), the Atmega88 for the much reported upon clock project. We have been mostly buying in small lots as is our wont, thus sensibly mitigating any potential disasters. We normally confirm delivery and then at some later stage test the chips, which is definitely not best practise. We were therefore a little consternated when the little chips from this particular order failed to be recognised by our nifty new QFP32 programmer.

Also mentioned on a previous blog was our order from Tindie for a high voltage AVR chip recovery board made in Slovakia. The unpopulated kit board had been sitting idle but this scenario seemed like a perfect time to solder up all the components and test the tester (and the reticent chips)!

Nice soldering, poor result

When all was soldered we grabbed a "good" chip (Attiny2313) and used it as a guinea pig - the Slovakian device performed as expected, recognising and resetting the fuses. Then the moment of truth arrived and with much anticipation the QFP32 package was clipped into the holder and - nada (observe the mocking red light in picture)!

We've contacted the supplier (no joy), and after a little digging around we have found that these chips date from 2013 and probably have either been recovered from a previous source (recycled) or have maybe been subjected to some environmental stress that has rendered them unresponsive and thus useless.

The positives from a half day of mucking about are:

• the soldering up of the Slovakian Wonder was fun
• the HVPP/HVSP AVR "fuse doctor" works well
• we learned more stuff

Many many people have contacted us about the furious fires festering away locally - thank you and we are safe at the moment and have a good fire plan. The smoke and ash hasn't been fun at all, but we are coping.

We've even been able to get out for our morning constitutional swim, walk and play!