Things were on track to have a working version as I soldered up the components on the veroboard. In my enthusiasm I had decided to use solid core wire to hookup all the components, which progressed well until it didn't.

Today, I learnt a harsh lesson about working with material on such a small scale. Here I was, with not a lot of soldering experience trying push a proverbial camel thorough the eye of the needle. My mistake with committing to solid core wiring become apparent as I found certain pins become close to inaccessible as more wires criss-crossed the board. Like Icarus, I persevered to the point I was faced with a populated board with everything connected (with joins of varying quality).

Finally came to the time to power it up. All my runs appeared to test ok on the multimeter but as soon as the 3V from the power supply was connected...nothing. Not even a flicker on the screen, had it not been for a small status light on the power supply fading out very quickly on each attempt I would've been chasing my tail for hours.

The application of a button cell battery with a capacitor in line produced similar results. Upon reflection I had a sinking feeling that I cooked the ATmega as I assembled the board. One painful exercise in desoldering later I salvaged the OLED and crystal but alas the ATmega remained stuck.

A walk around the block has led me to pursue the following steps:

-Rebuild board with more resonable dimensons using a socketed CPU and display

-Implementing a more stable power supply with support components rather than hooking a battery directly into the circuit.