[ot][spam][crazy] The Trials of Controlling a Programmer

[Undiscussed Horrific Abuse, One Victim of Many]

I have an LPC flasher (a chip programmer) I've been using to learn coreboot
and to try to drop a little life into an old board.

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.
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