Maybe it’s the return of grey, rainy weather; my enthusiasm for Radian is back in force and I am making what feels like rapid progress. I built one major component of the automatic parallelization system in one quick burst, and it worked practically the first time I ran it – I guess that thinking about it for so long meant I had a solid design in mind by the time I finally got down to writing the code. Why did I wait so long? Oh well – there’s plenty more to do, and I’m digging through it with gusto.

Tonight I’m doing a little debugging work on the new rhythm robot board. The microcontroller will not respond to my programming attempts – it appears to be dead. I’ve tested all the connections and they seem to be correct. Is it possible that I simply overheated the chip while soldering it in? Another instance of what appears to be exactly the same circuit works just fine in a breadboard. What’s more, I assembled just the microcontroller portion of a second board, and ran into exactly the same problem. It seems strange that I would have fried two chips in a row in exactly the same way, when I had no such problems building the bloom light boards, but the chips worked fine when I tested them in a breadboard beforehand. Oh, well, I’ll work it out eventually. In the meantime it’s tempting to just let the whole thing sit and work on something else, but I really do want to get this gadget running.