Yesterday, I managed to solve the pause button issue that I was facing. My main problem was running two timers at the same time so that I could use one to poll the button at a much shorter interval than the second timer for the lights. It took quite some fiddling, after I first tried to use the B timers to do this. However, I couldn’t get the compare timer working on the B timer, despite it having a compare register. I’m not too sure how it works yet, but I figured that the B timer compare register is actually for other purposes (such as using it to generate output), rather than an internal timer.
After quite some fiddling, I realized a much simpler solution to my issue than trying to get a B timer working on Timer 0: I just use the A timer on Timer 1. Now, Timer 0 is 8-bit and Timer 1 is 16-bit, so at first I thought it seemed a little wasteful but, then again, what else am I using that timer for anyway? So, I rewrote the program to have an A timer poll at a very high frequency (not even using a prescaler, if I recall), and found a little script online to debounce the button. Essentially, it just involves checking if the button is pressed, waiting for 25ms, and seeing if it’s still pressed. It seems to make use of the fact that a human being physically will not be able to push and release a button in that short a timeframe, and waiting to process it will also skip over the bouncing inbetween.
That still left me with an unsolved problem: the original version of this had two options for the button: a short press was a pause, and a long press was a reset. Right now, I don’t have that implemented. It would take a greatly different approach to the problem, as I did that using Arduino’s millis() function, and I have nothing similar on this firmware. However, the way I figured it, I have an ISP interface on there anyway, so I can get to that later if that’s still so important to me. ISP is awesome!
Next up came the soldering. Now, my first designs were for a PCB, so that I could make it in a nice little package that looked cool. However, that would have involved having that made in China, waiting a few weeks, and then possibly finding out that the footprints weren’t good because I changed this or that. So, I just figured to cut some perfboard and use my newly-learned solder bridge skills to make it. It was a good thing I did too, because I found out that some things were absolutely wrong. The button I was using for pause/reset, for instance, had two pins spaced two spaces apart, though by PCB design had it as one space apart. Similarly, the buzzer was slightly different than the footprint. On top of that, the ISP pin header I’d chosen was bigger than the header pin on the PCB. So, if I had ordered the PCB, it would not have worked for me in all likelihood!
Below you can see some pictures of the finished product. You’ll notice some of the adjustments I had to make in the side-by-side of the prototype and the design. The final picture shows a working model of the Pomodoro Timer r2. I have to tell you: I am so damned proud of myself for this one. There’s things to improve, like always, but this has got to be the cleanest, most complex working product I’ve made to date. Most of all, I built this up from scratch and learned so much from doing it.
Figure 1: The soldered prototype 
Figure 2: The PCB Design
