RE: Building and debugging my harvester - Part 2

shabaz — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 20:26:54 GMT

Hi Victor,

If you're absolutely sure the solution is to insert something to the VSS pin on a QFN and the ground plane, then one method (not great I must admit, but would work) would be to build half of the circuit on one PCB, and the other half on another PCB (only works if you've got a spare PCB though) and patch the two together. Or, strategically hacksaw the PCB into two pieces (a little extreme! but maybe feasible).

But, before anything so drastic like a hacksaw, it's interesting that the dev board was able to power up the MCU without the switch circuitry. I don't know anything about the microcontroller, maybe, it is possible to adjust the config register to slow down the internal clock speed, to consume less power? It may be worth a try.