Drat!!!

Lights 4 and 5 on the back of the second board (where I am installing the blue lights) won't light. As it happens, neither will any of 54-59, but we'll save that part of the story for later.

I remember the solder bridge between two pins, and one of those pins, A7, is involved with the lights that don't work. So, we carefully measure pin A7 and conclude that no matter how we program it, it acts like a high impedance. The natural conclusion is that it is burned out. So, run to Sparkfun, buy their last three ATmega328s, and a hot air rework station to pull the old chip. Carefully remove the old chip, taking care not to scorch the white paint on the board or blow away any of the passive components. When the chip comes off, it comes off great. Put in a new chip, verrrry carefully check continuity between each pin to make sure there are no bridges or missed joints. Fix a couple of missed joints. Guess what. The board acts exactly as it did.

So, that theory is shot. I might have burned out pins on this chip, but exactly the same pins? I think not. Now time to gather more evidence for another theory. Write up a program that listens for commands on the serial port and turns individual signals high or low, with the rest at high-Z. Signals 1 and 16 are both no good. What is going on?

The Arduino documentation says that you can use the analog input pins A0... as normal digital pins with the syntax pinMode(A0,OUTPUT); digitalWrite(A0,HI); etc. Which is in fact true, but only to a point. On an ATmega328, pins A6 and A7 are internally called ADC6 and ADC7, not PB...(ADC6) or anything like that. They are dedicated input pins. I had been planning (as in had a circut board made) to use A6 and A7 as Charlieplex lines 1 and 16. Guess which Charlieplex lines don't work... And guess which signals lights 4 and 5 (and 54-59) use...

I have no one to blame for this but myself. It was right on the Eagle schematic symbol the whole time that all the other A0... pins were secondary uses of GPIO pins, but A6 and A7 were only labeled as ADC. I guess the weird part is that the crystal inputs and reset line are alternate uses of GPIO lines, but A6 and A7 are not.

So, here's the plan. Lots of green wires, hot air, and razor blades, to hack D11 and D12 into P1 and P16. This will require giving up two multiplexers, which completely hashes my plan to use the GPS. At least this will let me test the charlieplex. Then, order 16 more blue lights, another FT232 and a correctly wired board which uses the crystal pins as two more digital outputs, allowing me to use D11 and D12 as multiplexer controllers on the next rev. NO getting a new board until all the green wires are fixed. Don't even touch Eagle until the last green wire is in place and CharlieTest works. Consider putting a LiPo battery power supply on the next board as well.

The moral of the story is keep working the problem until you find the problem, and don't guess. I have a nice new hot air rework station which works really well, and costs more than the LEDs combined. Oh well.