Well, I figured I'd rest for a while, since it didn't matter any more ( /sigh ) and write a long email I needed to get out, schedule-send it, and then test the TinyTyper out...

Lo and behold it wouldn't power from the USB cable. Worked fine from Mini-B, but then only the Arduino was gonna get power. Go figure.

Finally took a continuity tester to the USB plug I'd wired up for power... I do believe the guy who did up this cable used to work for Ma Bell back in the day, he wired it up just the way the phone company would have!

See, all the way back to when Western Union wasn't about sending money but sending messages that said "STOP" in between a lot of other, more important stuff ;) and when the guy that gave baud rates their name was still alive (he was a French fellow, by the name of Émile Baudot, by the way...) -- telephony and telegraphy have used a color-coding system exactly *opposite* that of more conventionally-encountered electronics.

In the electronics that most folks are used to, the convention is -- generally -- the lighter the color of the wire, the more positive the signal (or power voltage) going through it. Obviously, this is a rule of thumb ;) and not to be taken too literally. But that's why 0v Ground is black, and everything else is lighter... and why in computers, if you have a front-panel LED, the LED's color when lit is generally the negative and white is the positive lead ;)

However, in telephony and telegraphy, the exact *reverse* is true -- POSITIVE is black, and the lighter the color, the more negative you're getting, with respect to voltage. I've never heard the explanation for that, but I suppose it made sense at the time...

Of course, in China these days, it almost seems that "anything goes" is the scheme of the day, but when you're pinching pennies in the name of corporate profits so hard you can hear Lincoln jump andyelp all the way over in rush-hour downtown Beijing, I suppose something's got to give somewhere. Must be good for the shareholders... :-/ ugh.

But, sure enough -- whoever wired this cable put red to negative and black to the +5v supply. No wonder it didn't power up when I tried! and a dang good thing I've got a few more Harris chips in that yellowed old tube... oy. (Hopefully I won't need 'em here, but you just never know.)

Almost 7am here, and I've not yet been to bed yet. I guess I'll fire up the Hakko one more time, and grab a bit of caffeine while it warms up... shouldn't take too terribly long to fix *this* oopsie, at least...

EDIT roughly an hour later: yeah that was a pain in the butt... oh, and the TX/RX lines to the Harris chip are somehow shorted. I must've done that when I pulled the RX line out to fix things so the Arduino would program. It peeled the dang insulation back on that wire like it was a banana at lunchtime.

Screw this, I'm going to get some sleep while I still have a brain and some vague semblance of sanity. I'll finish fixing this dang thing tonight.