I received a cap in the mail today from EMSL. It's a 10uF 10V tantalum. My board's been working fine with a 10uF 35V electrolytic I found laying around earlier but I thought I better try out the "official" one. Surprisingly, it doesn't solve my problem. The board seems to reset less than without any cap but peggy_life shows quick ghost pixels in spots that shouldn't be lit. It does this on normal as well as faster speeds. I also couldn't run peggy2_minimal reliably. It acted like it did when I started this thread, either giving me the neat moving patterns or a quick flash then nothing. I checked the solder connections and they seemed fine. After a bit more testing I put my old cap back and the board is working fine again. It's very weird. I'm not sure why the electrolytic of the same value would work and the tantalum won't. I'm putting them in the exact same place which is through the holes immediately to the left of the 168. I got the polarity right. There was a + on the tantalum. It's no big deal. I just wanted to report my findings. I must have a very unique board indeed.

Quote by: Windell

SUzB: Can you describe what the exact problem is, in some detail?

Putting Peggy on some lines on the top are on (the nine LED on the left are off). Some of them are blinking. Some are less bright. After a few seconds all lines are off.

After I moved Peggy some of the LEDs which where off are on they are blinking. In this case there are no complete lines. Its like xoxox. Now it does not stop.

Further we are not able to change the program via USB. We get an error that Peggy is not available. We was in the past.

We are using Peggy without batteries with the power supply.
We put the additional buttons on which we would like to use for games.

Regards

Stefan

SUzB: It sounds like you have more than one outstanding issue.

Normally, in the few seconds after the Peggy is turned on, the display will flash erratically, but you should see whole rows. Since your left nine LEDs are off, there's something additionally wrong there, and I'm not sure what could be possibly different about the left nine columns-- you'll need to carefully inspect the board to see what's going on.

If Peggy changes behavior when you move it, then you probably have some poor solder joints, which don't make good electrical connections when they move. It's also possible that one or more of your chips is not fully seated in the sockets.

It seems likely that for one reason or another your microcontroller is also not executing its program correctly. In the past we've seen that sort of thing when the chip is not fully seated, or when one of the socket pins is not fully in the circuit board, or when there's a bad solder joint. Also make sure that the two small capacitors with the crystal are in place correctly.

I would suggest that you (1) (temporarily) install the battery box while you get everything else working-- the power supply is one more thing to worry about, and (2) turn down the LED brightness all the way while you are trying to get things working. Your most important tool at this point is your eyes-- there may be one or more "solder bridges" between things that shouldn't be connected, or some cold solder joints, which look grey and dull, rather than shiny and wet.