This was a bad week for electronics.  I bricked my Atmega 128 development board, and I also discovered that I had ordered the wrong low pass filter.  The IC was $10, and it was supposed to be a DIP8-easily accessible for development.  Oops.  I accidentally ordered an SOIC chip.

Last night I was in The Secret Laboratory, trying to get something done.  After some very fine soldering, I failed to thaw out my bricked development board.  Next I decided to try building an adapter board for the low pass filter.  I had already created the photo mask, but this would be the first time I tried to use the photo-lithography method of creating a board.

Velum makes a good printing medium (especially if you have a laser printer) because it resists crinkling and warping.  My first three attempts failed to produce useable boards, though.  At 10:30PM I gave up and went upstairs to see what Aimee was doing.  She was sleeping.

Since I've been having a difficult time sleeping lately, I did what any other bored mad scientist wannabe would do.  I went back downstairs.  The results:

So, my results were finally pretty good, but how good?  How fine was this work?

This is the mask that I used for creating the adapter board.  Let's take another look at that board...

And again:

I always suspected that soldering surface mount parts would be difficult, but I've got to say...it was harder than I had expected.  If you breathe too heavily directly on the parts...they scoot around on the board until you get one of the pins tacked down.

My black light, developer, and etchant.  By the way, using the velum...exposure time is about 11 minutes.