After a month or more of use, my programmer just won't program anymore. When I try to flash things flashrom complains that no flash chip was detected.

Note: the spacebar on my hardware-keyboard phone is also breaking, so I may be less verbose. Similarly, my raspberry pi won't seem to load gnome, and I still haven't figured out how to get neomutt to download email.

The neomutt challenge seems the easiest, but is kind of different.

Anyway, the programmer is breadboarded based on a teensy board, and the LPC socket was sometimes showing the issue previously, refusing to find the LPC chip unless I reinserted it a number of times.

Long ago I would have been excited to troubleshoot an LPC socket. It would perhaps have been an excuse to build a logic analyser with tiny LPC leads.

Nowadays most of my brain refuses to move carefully with intensity comparable to trauma, and for that and other dangerous and unknown reasons, my hands and fingers shake and jerk and my visual perception is quite poor, partly from my eyes doing the same.

This coreboot task has been really great. It can be many months between having a project that feels like a doable, productive challenge, where I can often barely control my body let alone my mind.

But I need a programmer if I want to keep porting the bios for my motherboard.

I used some small jumper wires to try to test some of the leads around an lpc chip once. Unfortunately I didn't verify the chip wasn't one I had burned out, a different issue. Additionally, I wasn't [amnesia shift here, hello! we're describing working on fixing the plcc flasher] sure my jumper wires were touching the chip and not the socket which are very very near.

But I did try to gently bend some leads to resolve connection issues, and thinking on that I guess that means I might have a way to consider whether I'm testing the chip leads or socket leads.

Anyway, it still didn't work,even with a known-working chip, but I didn't examine it with a known-working chip.

Then later, I tested connections from the chip seating all the way to the teensy board, and found a number that were failing due to wear on the breadboard, and adjusted and squeezed these until they conducted. But it still wouldn't detect a known-working chip.

I then removed it from the breadboard and wired it up hanging in the air with female jumper wires. This is not working either.

I also have two pcbs of this tool I tried to solder, but I have broken the smd pads off on both from being uncareful while doing so.

When I try to be careful, it can stimulate my spasms further in various ways, a gently developing frustration of some years now.

There used to be sold flashers for LPC chips, but I haven't found any, which is a blessing in some ways, for open hardware and all. I was thinking of buying an arduino, for which flasher code exists. I actually should _have_ arduinos somewhere, unused for years, uncertain where. I was also thinking of porting a flasher to use my raspberry pis gpio pins.

But these other flasher board ideas don't seem to have much return right now, when I have reason to believe the problem could be in the socket.

I also have a small handful of smd sockets. Hard to solder without a pcb.

I could also attempt to desolder the pcb from my breadboardable socket.

I think another breadboardable socket is in the mail, but I worry I will forget I am working the task if I stop working it.

I'd like to compare the electrical activity at the chip pins to what the device is supposed to send somehow.

Maybe I could try to add debug information to flashrom's serprog protocol, although I'm feeling that might be inefficient.