I let the magic smoke out of an attiny85 tonight. About a week ago, too late at night, I had put it into the programmer and then left it by my computer. Tonight, I put the programmer into the computer and tried to program the attiny85, but avrdude complained. When I removed the programmer, it was hot. On closer inspection, I discovered that I had inserted the attiny85 into the programmer backwards. Letting it cool and putting it in correctly didn’t fix things, either.

Thankfully, it was the attiny85 that was cooked, not the attiny84 that is the brains of the tiny avr programmer. I pulled another $1.40 attiny85 out of the tube and finished my little project. ☺

Michael K Johnson July 11, 2014 22:03

Also, thanks to dissecting a dying kitchen appliance with my children last night, I had a set of the right size screws to properly close my project enclosure. Looks much better than scotch tape!

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable