SparkFun Electronics Forum

Hi all, hate for my first post on the forum to be negative but has anyone else ordered a boot loaded MCU from SparFun but received a bare one? I ordered a 328P a while back and it simply wouldn't take an upload. After much frustration I eventually ran a chip detector sketch on it to learn it was bare. In addition the chip pulls 90mA just sitting there compared to a chip out of a Uno that draws 20mA with the same sketch. Whats up with that ? I configured it to run an internal oscillator, killed the ADC and SPI and it still sucks 90mA doing nothing in a bare minimum circuit. It's pretty much useless.

Yeah I figured it out and yes it didn't cost much but was this the only chip that went out this way?

Sounds like an ESD issue.. I've never heard of that issue until now.

Hmm, hadn't considered that. I'm pretty careful but that doesn't mean it didn't get zapped or even zapped before it got to me. You may be right.