I submitted my order to Mouser today. While that's on its way here I'll lay out my circuit board. When the order gets here, I'll verify footprints and then send off my gerber files to have a custom PCB made.
The June contest date is approaching way too fast! I don't even have my hardware done yet, so I can't do a whole lot of software development. Argh!
I spent a good chunk of today getting frustrated with my AVC code. I have custom firmware on my GPS so that it sends a fixed-length binary sentence to my microcontroller. Rather than polling the USART, or handing an interrupt every time a character comes in, I figured this is a perfect application for the DMA controller... tell the DMA controller how many characters there are, and have it wake up my code when I receive a full GPS sentence.
Well, during debugging, I found that my DMA IRQ was being handled once, but I couldn't get it to trigger a second time. After wrestling with this for hours, I finally thought, what if the second DMA interrupt really is happening, but because I've got the CPU stopped at a breakpoint, I'm missing it?
So, I took out my breakpoint and instead threw a character out the USART every time the DMA IRA was called. And lo and behold, I got a DMA IRQ five times a second, which is just how often the GPS is sending me data.
Embedded programming can be so frustrating.