Assuming the question is serious, I'd say you are highly likely to be fine. The RF power coming out of your phone is quite weak and if I'm not mistaken, the operating frequency causes most of the energy to get absorbed in the top layer of your skin and turned into heat. I wish I had numbers to attach to this, but I don't. I wouldn't worry about getting cooked haha.

This is great!!! :D

@Condor hahaha I could, but I actually like the management! It felt more like an accident from lack of planning that the situation arose rather than an intentional "screw everything, let's get this product out the door fast". My current plan is to try and be as heavily involved in a design phase as I can be, and I'm even developing tools right now for myself that can help me write new hardware drivers without being on the actual embedded system.

@Fast-Nop Wow thanks!! My code lives mostly in DAL B, but I occasionally get into A. It's funny, your process description sounds pretty much exactly like what my company already does, so that makes me feel better about how we qualify and organize our code.

@Gogeta70 Thanks! Yeah the redundancy thing has been my main approach thus far, plus lots of tests and lots of runtime checks in the code.

Don't lose heart! I am an EE that switched over to full time software engineering purely by teaching myself how to code from my side projects. It's a fun way to learn, but can be difficult at times. I've been at it for 7 years now (started my freshman year of college with an Arduino and an LED) and still find my code to be ugly despite having learned a ton. Its a good thing too! It means you/me are growing :)

EE (embedded dev too) here! I looked at the data sheet for the part and the internal circuit diagram makes it look like the two power rails VCC1 and VCC2 are physically isolated. You MAY be getting some slight leakage depending on how they have things configured in silicon, but I doubt it. My best guess is you wired something incorrectly, which isn't hard to do on a perfboard. I would double check that first. Also, don't put much stock in your resistance measurements. For reasons too long to go into, probing in-circuit like that is going to give you a false impression about what is going on. There are too many active devices and other elements that screw with the reading.

Edit: Do you have the full schematic you are using to build the thing?

Edit2: Are you able to take the chip out of the board and measure the resistance between VCC1 & VCC2? You may have accidentally blown something up internally. Static electricity could have even done that.

@Condor I guess we know at least one can since this atrocious thing exists! 😂 There are a lot of messed up businessmen out there who will sacrifice quality/safety for money IMO. Especially with cheaper end products like this.

EE here: To answer the first question, the moron who "designed" this wanted or was told to increase profit margins for the product. It's not a high reliability design, so if you can save a few cents on a component or two (or even better, eliminate components), you do it because you are making a couple million of these toys. A couple million * a few cents is still a lot of $$$.

@intromatt Yup, it's from Ikea. Surprisingly great back support if you sit properly!

@retnikt Elusive Electrons?!

Maybe go workout when you get that feeling? That's what I do and it really helps keep me sane and productive.

At least he learned proper indexing young! You have done the world a great service my friend.

Are you allowed to use Pspice at all? It might help you with some of the design tasks so you aren't sitting there iterating on the math all day by hand.

Nice catch!! Memory packing is seriously a pain sometimes...

Dang, good luck man. For a first year student that will be pretty cool to see!