I’ve mostly recovered from the power supply disaster. Instead of replacing the ATMEL AVRISP programmer, I purchased a USBtinyAVR kit. I figured that I would be able to repair any damage instead of doing a replacement, if I burned another programmer up. Well the kit works alright, but isn’t nearly as well integrated into AVR studio software as the ATMEL programmer was. Anyway, I’ve been able to get back to work finishing the format and write functions, well sort of.

Now I am working with a regulated bench power supply jumpered to the mother board with alligator clips (I guess I don’t learn). The wall wart is on the back burner until I can find a better 12 volt regulator solution.

Since the great power supply disaster I have had issues with dropping RS-232 characters being sent from my proto-board. I also found that I couldn’t fit all 16 sectors on a track during the format process. Tweaking the speed of the drive solved the formatting issue, but this clearly isn’t an acceptable workaround. What is really happening with both these issues is that, for some reason, the processor clock is now running way too slow. I need to recalibrate the internal RC oscillator that I’m using to clock this device. That will hopefully solve both issues.