The official Electronic Tour Guide project blog

The night testing story

Posted: June 24, 2015 at 9:21 am, Category: Devices,

You won’t believe me. After the 3 month of preparation and polishing of the new add-on for our little gimmicks me and my robo-friend Creaky found the most stupid and ridiculous bug I ever seen. To make the story short: some days ago, when everything was done and new shiny version of PCB layout was ready for fabrication, I decide to go to test device outside, like I did before hundreds of times. That was night and I went to the street romantically surrounded by the shades of trees to make couple of circles around the house and enjoy the night breath… suddenly after couple of minutes of walk I heard the message “battery is down, device going to sleep…” a-a-a what the hell?

I start digging it and have been checking practically everything, without any result. At home everything works just fine, outside — nope! I was repeating this procedure several times invariably with the same result. Only with the advent of the first rays of the sun I’ve got idea to try it in the fridge. And viola, it start switching off :) Attentive re-reading of data-sheets gave me the answer: the ATtiny, which a was planning to use as a co-processor, is a very temperature sensitive. If you don’t use external crystal oscillator, most probably you will get significant changing of frequency, which is a deadly when you need to sync anything.

Electronic Tour Guide, the GPS City audio companion, rejected module on testing breadboard.

It is always pleasure for me and my robo-friend Creaky to fund solution or learn something new. Eventually the whole life is a permanent process of learning. However, the worst side of the story is that looks like I need to redesign the whole beautifully created module form scratch :( and it was so elegant…

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