I royally botched a GoodFET build today, and at least some of the blame rests with the silly paper solder stencil that I made (shush, it was glossy and it should have worked better. Who doesn't want to save a buck?) I figured it was worth a shot. One fried MSP430 later (I had to use my hot air gun thingamajig to get it off and realign it, and I suspect I cooked its guts in the process) I'm back at square one and I still don't have a GoodFET. Argh?
That which does not kill us makes us...something.
Oh well. I just ordered replacement chips through Newark/Element14 so round 2 is coming.
UPDATE, 6/13: I have replaced the MSP430 2618 chip (torched by my heat gun during Round 1) with a less expensive 2418. This time, I hand-soldered it. No complaints or errors so far. Two things worth noting for others that my be considering building a GoodFET: the 2418 chip seems to be a drop-in replacement for the 2618 (fingers are crossed that the Internet has not let me down on this bit of information) and the monitor self-test ("goodfet.monitor test" at a command prompt) takes a really long time. Don't kill it thinking it's frozen or in an infinite loop, both of which are probably not true.
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