I appear to have fried my last remaining functioning Nano with an exploding capacitor, but I did have a RedBoard (Uno clone) and a Nano I’d scrambled by writing outside (way outside) array bounds. So I learned how to hook them up and burn the bootloader:
And am back on the air. 
(Only problem is, apparently it’s the new bootloader, so I have to keep track of that — the Tayda Nanos come with the old bootloader.)
I use one of these:
With this adapter:
It’s super easy to use with the Arduino IDE and when you’re not using it you get a spare Kosmo power connector.
Using a standard Uno/clone works perfectly well though.
I’ve used CircuitLab for a while now, and it does have some nice features, but also some drawbacks: Cost, the occasional obnoxious CAPTCHA, and many parts including logic chips and OTAs not available. LTspice has been mentioned here a few times so I decided to give it a try. Seems to work fine in Linux using Wine. (The software, I mean, not the enabling fluid.)
And a couple days later, as an exercise, I think I have gotten reasonably filter-ish looking behavior out of an MS-20 VCF:
Looks good!
Did you ever try simulating from KiCAD? I had some modest success with that - all native Linux. I think it’s ngspice under the hood.
Click through here - there’s a transient plot:
I did start to try that once and didn’t follow up… might need to take another look.
I got slider caps that were too wide. Gonna have to go Ali Express. Expensive to get anywhere else
Mine are these:
I spent yesterday evening making some potentiometers for LTspice. You can find them here:
Lin and log (log is the “realistic” log, which is just two different linear functions 
)
Oh, and as I wrote in the readme: DON’T TRUST ME WITH THE DIRECTION!!
Ooh look now I can justify DHL shipping over the slow boat.
I passed my interim driving test! 
Man driving a car freaks me out for some reason, but i didn’t let my anxiety hold me back.
If i do this well on my exam it shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Major mood and confidence boost for me
This is Tayda? Or jlcpcb?
Tayda.
discourse20chars…
First time I’ve built with a bare microcontroller, and flashed it. Only took about five avrdude commands that responded ‘WTF?’ before I hit on the right ones.
Also the first time I’ve used the flip side of my DIP pin straightener. I’d forgotten it even had a flip side.
Try programming PICs or ARM cores, AVR’s a breeze compared to them.
I have a PG164100 that talks to MPLAB for programming PICs and AVRs. I’ve done one PIC so far, fairly painless.
For the STM32 ARM cores I’ve been playing with I have an STLINK-V3MINI and can talk to it with openocd, its all relatively straightforward.
I’ve never used an Arduino, so I don’t know if it’s any harder/easier or whatever. I did use the arduino IDE to program a Teensy, but I was just following some instructions and didn’t really pay attention to what was going on under the hood.
The best thing, at least with the stlink is you can do in circuit debugging - so you can run your code on the device and step through execution and probe variables etc, which is really useful for getting things to work.
