Hi, just a quick behind-the-scenes video, because quite a few people asked how I did the Microchip/Atmel April Fools video. And Quite a lot of people guessed it. Of course,, it's pretty easy. So Here it is.

Yes, I did have something plugged into the back which you didn't see. There's an extra USB cable headed off to, you guessed it,, a PICkit 3! But No,, it's not connected to a different board, it is actually connected to the MicroCalc here. Just like in my 555 timer video. What you didn't see are a few wires there-- there we go.

Headed Out the back, through my anti-static mat of course, and over to-- Tada! There it is,. there's the culprit. There's a real PICkit 3 of course. Dead easy, just like the 555 timer.

But Aha! A Lot of people said how did I do the LED on there? This thing was,, you know,, flickering! Did I actually have-- modify the real firmware in there. Naw, of course not, not going to go to that amount of trouble, bugger that. Same thing. When You're on-- when you're on a winner, stick with it..

There We go,. we've got some wires going under there, and because that LED is driven by a-- you know,, essentially an open-collector output from the microcontroller there, just used a resistor on the back, shorted it out, and the wires... come out the front of the mat here. So What you didn't see is me operating this behind the scenes.

While I was syncing-- while I was using the mouse button with one hand,, I was secretly just joining a couple of wires there, and there's the LED going there. Because all I'm doing is shorting out that-- well,, pulling that resistor low. It's connected to the 5 volt rail on one end, and you just pull it low with a series resistor on the other end so you can't harm the AVR Dragon at all. And, well,, that's all there is to it! And You may have actually caught this in the video slightly.

You may be wondering, well,, how can I wire just the PICkit 3 in parallel with that micro and also have the pins from here doing it. Well I Don't know if there's a buffer on there or not that could be disabled or something like that, so I didn't bother doing that. So What it is, is you may have noticed that in the video, some of these wires have a bit more wobble on them-- oop, look, they've just fallen out there. Because, they're actually had the pins removed from them.

So They weren't actually making contact down on that board. Pretty Basic. I Wasn't actually going to do an April Fools' video. I had actually given up because I went on a 7-day holiday just before, and yeah., I was trying-- I Wanted to do something a bit more elaborate, but I just ran out of time to do it really.

So-- But yes,, I was actually going to just completely forget about it for this year, which maybe would have made next year's one better. But Anyway,, I-- at the last minute I decided, aww, yeah, I'll do something like this, and well,, I put it together like, within like the hour of uploading the thing, just in time. I Did it-- I raced to the lab, did it just in time, and it worked. A treat.

Fooled a few people. So There you go. Catch you next time!.