I finished building the $50 robot board to the best of my abilities, and can't seem to get past error -24.
I'm using the 9V battery and 4.8V AA holder. I opted for an ATMEGA88 instead of ATMEGA8 mostly because I was already getting all my other parts from digikey and digikey was out of the ATMEGA8 and I didn't want to pay double shipping by ordering from 2 different places. Two of the parts I received looked a little different from what the pictures showed. The parts were the 220uF capacitor, and the 0.1uF capacitor. The part they sent in the bag labeled 220uF capacitor was in fact not a capacitor at all. I contacted them about it and they agreed to send me another 220uF capacitor free of charge, but I didn't want to wait so I strolled down to my local radioshack and bought one. As for the 0.1uF capacitor, it looked very similar to what was shown in the tutorial. It has the same color, but is a bit smaller and spherical instead of a disc shape. I just assumed this is what capacitors look like sometimes and didn't give it a second thought. But now that I really think about it, I think it might have been an incorrect part as well.
Also, I think my LED might be shot. It was working fine when I got it, but I suspect I might have fried it either with my multimeter (unlikely) or when I was soldering. Fortunately I ordered 2 of these, because I know LEDs are cheap and always useful. I probably should have ordered more like 10. Would a bad LED cause an error -24? Would it be safe to check the LED by connected jumper wires from the 5V pin of the voltage regulator and ground to the pins on the resistor and the LED? I know not to connect 5V straight to the LED without the resistor; I've made a few of these go pop before.
I checked every connection multiple times with a multimeter, and everything seems to have continuity where it should, and no continuity where it shouldn't. When I connect the battery and check voltages, everything seems to have the voltages they should, and everything that shouldn't has 0V. I checked every pin on the atmega for continuity with what it's supposed to be connected to in the diagram, everything checks out fine. I checked continuity and voltages on the programmer pins and they're all what they are supposed to be as well.
I'm using the dongle serial programmer with PonyProg2000 2.07c. I have made sure that I set the COM port correctly and set PonyProg to use the ATMEGA88. I know I will eventually have to adjust the source code for the different clockspeed of the atmega88, but I know that wouldn't cause an error -24. I can provide any pictures that might help upon request.
