Trials & Tribulations with the ATmega168
I created a board design for some hardware that involves two ATmega chips in TQFP form. TQFP stands for Thin Quad Flat Package, and is basically on the larger end of the surface-mount chips (but still way smaller than chips in DIP form). Whether you use ATmega328 or ATmega168 chips on this board is irrelevant until you start talking about large quantities, in which the 168 will spare a great deal of production costs. What this hardware does is irrelevant for now (though you will find out soon enough), but I wanted to share my experiences trying to get this board and its chips to work in exactly the way I intended. It was very difficult, for some reason, to get the 168s to cooperate with me, while the 328s worked with no trouble at all. My Board Design, with ATmega168s and SMD resistors (all soldered on by hand by Yours Truly, who doesn't even have all that much soldering experience :-P) The Problem? One of my product requirements is that users can upgra...