General troubleshooting

Its starts with a general inspection of the board and reflowing any solder joints that look cold (not smooth and shiny)

Then using a multimeter, check all the connections, making sure that Vcc and GND are not shorting, and that all the components are well soldered.

Check for bridges , especially on the USB connector and and the ATtiny.

Use flux and desoldering braid to remove the solder and disconnect the bridges.

Still not working?

I knew I had a problem because when trying to run the "make fuse" command, I had this :

Since I had verified all my connections I thought it was a software problem, so I installed Avrdude and GCC again, just in case:

Type:

Then:

Press "y".

I also tried running all the progrmmaing commands as root but didn't change anything.

My instructor told me it could be one of the components that was dead, especially the ATtiny chip which I had re-touched a couple of times.

When I was about to go mill a new board and start all over again , I decided to give it a last try, the ATtiny was tricky to solder so I knew if there was a problem somewhere it would be with that component.

So I changed my tools :

And de-soldered the ATtiny cheap by simply holding my board by the chip and gently heating the ATtiny until the board felt.

I replaced the same component and used the soldering iron to resolder one pin, and used the heat gun to resolder the rest of them in an instant:

The chip is not even well aligned with the pins, but we can see that the connections are smooth and shiny

I then retried to program the board, and it actually worked! Thinking that I almost throw away the board!