My DIY projects out there for the curious souls to see.

       I was throwing a bunch of stuff out and found an old PCB with a very curious looking SIL package, that was encased in a plastic shell. And me being as curious as I am I had to tear it apart to see what's inside, and I'm glad I did. What I found inside were SMD components, which is pretty advanced stuff for 1991, not to mention a flip chip SMD IC, fancy. I believe this thing came from an old TV but I might be mistaken, anyways here are some photos. Backside of the substrate has some capacitors/quartz crystals? Chip desoldered. Underside of the chip.

      When I received my SAMD10 Xplained mini it came with no pins, which makes hooking up to the board a little more difficult. A regular breadboard jumper wire is too loose in the hole and does not make a reliable contact, not to mention how hard it is to heep in place.  So I came up with a way to make probes to plug into the plated holes in the PCB reliably and firmly. To make them you only need an old IDE/floppy cable, some wire and either heatshrink tubing or electrical tape.       First you take the back plastic piece off the IDE cable connector, this plastic clip keeps the cable in place. You can rip it right off because we don't need it. After you take it out you can then pull off the IDE cable. This leaves you with only a bare connector with some spikes sticking out where the wire used to be. These spikes are the contacts for the IDE connector and they're what we're going to make our probes out of.      Secondly, you t...

      Recently I dived down the rabbit hole of SWD programmers because I chose a SAMD10 MCU for my project, which is programmed through SWD. But guess what, SWD is not SWD but it also kind of is? If you program STM32 devices you will no doubt know what SWD is and that your ST-link can be reprogrammed to be a J-link. And J-link is supposed to be a general purpose SWD programmer that works for everything right? No. When I reflashed my genuine ST-link to J-link it would talk to Atmel studio, everything seemed like it would work but nothing did. Turns out this SWD interface is only an SWD interface when a ST microcontroller is connected but as soon as it touches Atmel stuff it goes "Not supported" and refuses to talk. Like why? Is this Cortex M0 device not a Cortex M0 device, is this SWD not SWD? We'll never know.     So I start looking for alternatives and one forum member pointed me to a dev board named the SAMD10 Xplained Mini, which just so happens to have the e...