This Saturday I continued with the commissioning of my unified singing pumpkin controller. I got all the sub-systems working except for the power amplifier. In the picture above, on the left is the pumpkin controller. On the right is a (normal) Arduino amplifier shield using the same amp chip.  That shield works. If you look carefully you can see that the chip pins are mirrored between the two boards.

Mirroring pins is an innocent enough mistake. It happens to everyone once in a while. The problem is that I made the EXACT same mistake on the first round of that amplifier shield. (Notice the R2 on the right hand silk?) Apparently I fixed that problem manually without correcting my library symbol. That was many months ago and I forgot about it, thus resulting in a repeat of the same error on the unified pumpkin controller. Dumb mistake! It would have taken 10 mins at most to fix the symbol.

Don’t be like me, fix your symbols the moment you notice the mistake! You may not get back to it for a while and may not remember there was a problem.