As I discussed in my previous post about my pomodoro project, there were a few issues with the board as I’d soldered it. The first main issue was that the pomodoro LEDs weren’t lighting up. Well, as it turns out, there were two broken connections there. For one LED, the wire from the IC wasn’t connecting to the resistor, and for the other two, the wire to ground didn’t connect properly. A quick little resolder, and off we were.
The second main issue was that I hadn’t put in an ISP interface, because I’d messed up the first one, and didn’t have any easy pins available. However, as I considered later, what I did have was some tinned 0.6mm wire that is rather sturdy, so I figured to just solder those to the board. As you can see in the rightmost picture below, a sloppy soldering job later and the ISP is connected in green (along with a VCC and GND wire on there).
The original breadboard soldering, without the ISP interface 
The breadboard with an ISP interface added
And, as you can see in the picture below, it’s up and running, now with a functioning ISP interface. That’ll be handy, because there is still that odd delay between pomodoros and pauses to sort. On top of that, I noticed that my code doesn’t actually use the third pomodoro. Normally, in a traditional pomodoro technique, you put a checkmark on some paper after each activity; once you reach four, then you take a bigger break. So, I’d set up the lights to have four “checkmarks” on. However, in my current code, it doesn’t put on the checkmark until you start the next pomodoro. That’s a sequence thing to fix as well.
Fortunately, with the ISP interface in place, I can now quite easily reprogram the IC, and do a little bit of testing with each iteration of the program.
EDIT: well, that didn’t take long to fix at all. First of all, I programmed in my own little off-by-one problem. The reason that there was this extra minute between each state change was because I’d put it there: because I’d coded in an update to the LEDs only after an interval was elapsed, meant that the first minute was never displayed. My initial solution was to add an interval + 1 – that way, when the interval started, it started at the right number. Of course, when I was testing this, I was testing it at high speed, so I never noticed that the timing was so off. Now that I ran it at it’s proper minute interval speed, that little off-by-one second became an off-by-one minute. Fixed before you know it.
As for that binary 4 pomodoro LED that wasn’t being used? It actually is. Except I didn’t solder the right resistor to it . . . Instead of 220Ohm, there’s a 10kOhm resistor there. It’s on, it’s just very, very dim. Guess it’s time to replace that resistor!