Trust

It was a weird day. We had both ACV and CVC soldered. We had already checked that the CVC ckt worked alright. We had failed once with the ACV circuit. We had burned a pic in the process, so Matt and I were apprehensive about testing out the same ckt again (with some modifications). So we put all the pieces and chips in the sockets and turned on the power supply. We tried to see if we got any UART response from the bus pirate when we swiped the card in front of the reader. It wasn't working. Again. We checked if some chips were getting hot, as had turned out in the last attempt, and they were this time too! Then out of respect to Jackie's efforts in soldering, we decided that there was something wrong about the way we were doing it. We traced our paths back and couldn't find any problem. Just out of whim, we decided to switch our power supply source to the batteries we had. We though that it may be wrong driving  the o/p pins of the voltage regulator with the external power supply we connected initially. Apparently the 7805 isn't reverse protected. This time, with the batteries as power, we incrementally went about testing the ckt- RFID reader output. It worked. Then we added in the RFID PIC. It worked. Then added in the Security chip related PIC. It worked. Then added in the security controller. It worked. Then added in the main PIC. It worked! I texted Jackie and congratulated her on her effort. She looked satisfied, evident from the text back.

This brings me to the thing that got us through today- trust. We just happened to trust each other more at crucial moments and prevented a mega-soldering effort that Matt and I had planned for tomorrow. I am amazed how much trust one can have in someone you know well only since last couple of weeks