Anyone who remembers my last rant about getting fake chips might enjoy this.

After realizing that the EEPROMs I got last time were counterfeit, I bought a new set (and different model) from Atmel. They were super easy to hook up, and the best part is they actually work! Behold, my bit-by-bit EEPROM programmer:

Short story for the one interessed in the image: when we change idea we change the whole idea. And it is likely to happen very often. Sometimes twice a day, every day, for a week.
Long stort:
I am hopeless:
I am an IT university student, i know how to program and how to search for a fucking manual, but i am dealing with eletronics and PCB...

I have to make the firmware for a board (atmel things) and it have to talk via spi with some other devices (it is slave of one, and master for all the others(i will use two spi channels)), this should be easy...
I am have no senior to ask to, all i have is google and i found problems in every thing i try to do, every - fucking - single - one!!!! I know that the solution is always of the "you have to plug it in" type, but
NEITHER GOOGLE IS BEING OF HELP!
Let me explain this morning pain:
i can't add libraries in atmel studio, something wrong with the asf wizard, i have only found a tutorial that says what buttons press to solve my problem... I DO NOT HAVE THIS BUTTONS!!!
And the library i wanted to add is the one to make the board talk with the computer on his COM port... (And have some debug message...)
And the wizard gives problem because i created the project using an online atmel tool...
YES, i tried to create a project with asf and then add the files given by the online tool.... THEY DO NOT COMPILE, I SHOULD HAVE TO MESS WITH A 400 LINES LONG MAKEFILE, that is anything but human readable...
I haven't even look for anything spi related this morning
I am even forced to use windows, because every question in the forums, or every noobbish tutorial is based on it...

And then i find the tutorial with the perfect title, holy shit this is the thing i truly need!!!!! It says how to open a file. And then stops. WHAT ABOUT THE THING YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT IN THE TITLE??????

This project is the upgrade of a glue-pump based on an atmega328 (arduino uno processor), that is currently being produced and sold by our "company" .... .... That is composed by me and the boss.
He is a very nice and and smart person, he tries to give me ideas for the solution, if i cannot find out how to do something we can even change a lot of specifics of the project (the image shows our idea-change) and every board has some weeks of mornings like the one described above (i work only in the morning).
I am learning a very lot of things...
But the fact that every thins i try fails is destroying me, what would you do in my place?

Ps. Lot lf love for the ones who made it until the end <3

I think Atmel Studio wants to tell me something...

I'm part of a robotics team in my highschool. We work on autonomous robots, which are driven with microcontrollers like the Arduino and "bare" Atmel chips.

Last year we were using a protocol called CAN. CAN is a bus which runs at 1Mbps and it is quite easy to connect devices together. (It's a bus ofc it is). BUT... it needs a terminator at the end, mostly 120 ohm.

Every year we are on a deadline and something broke on our current board and we needed to solder up a new one, but we couldn't find the 120 ohm terminator... ANYWHERE!

At end after searching for it in the workshop for 4h straight (12am- 4am) we finally found it, and soldered up the new board and guess what... it wasn't what we thought, the code was the problem.

After realizing the problem my teammate and I, in silence just stood up, packed our things and went home. Argh!

Whoever complains about Visual Studio has never once coded in Atmel Studio... They may look the same, but while one is used to program, the others only purpose in life is to give people a mental breakdown...

Loving inaccurate documentation...
And it's from a big company as well!

Reset value: 0x0000007F

I didn't get it to work for several hours.
And then I checked...
The actual value it gets reset to is 0.

Just 0.

Debugging Embedded Systems is so effing hardddd. :(

Oh... I dont know what to pick...
So i will pick 3 projects from my 3 stages of my dev "carrier"

1.Right after i discovered programing and learned how ,if, while and similar structures worked. The launguage was object pascal with delphi 2007
That was a "safe" with a stupidly complicated lock (text inputs, sliders, ect) it opened a secret folder in the end.

2. It was a embedded code for a Atmega8 AVR, Atmel studio, pure C but without memory managment (i didnt even know that it even existed)
It was a Pip boy knockoff, 16x2 display and a small keyboard connected to the arduino like board that i made on a proto board.
It wasnt that much of a pipboy, it was more of a showoff of atmega8 internal systems, (ADC, timers, interrupts and such)

3.DataLab, after helping my friend with his master thesis, (we meet on discord long story, i was in high school) i decided that mathlab is shit and i created a visual scripting enviroment, launguage C# .net 4 (in the latest version)
I remade the whole program from scrach 1 time, significantly improving everything (code reuse, better algorithms, data processing, code redability and edge cases) I have learned good practises from everywhere. I learned how to use git.

DataLab project looks just like LabViev (i didnt notice that it even existed...), it is frozen now because of my mental status but im planning on using it on my CV when i will be looking for jobs on holidays. There are many things that i can improve in that program but ... first i have to fix myself.