Really Bare Bones Board Build

I purchased an RBBB(Really Bare Bones Board) from Modern Device Company quite some time ago and I never quite got it to work right. The RBBB is a VERY minimalist version of the Arduino which is easy to put on a solderless breadboard. The kit cost $7 but you have to solder it together, including some very small components, so it can be chalenging if you are new to soldering, and damn near impossible if you have a crappy Radio Shack soldering iron. I had purchased a $150 Weller iron prior to the build, so I had nothing but inexperiance and lack of skill to blame for my troubles.

I actually managed to get the more difficult components soldered on without a problem but I somehow managed to overheat one of the pads on the pcb and I lost a connection to ground because of that. The board would work it was positioned just right such that the pad made contact, but it failed more often than not.

Tonight while working on the Xbees I decided that I should finally get around to fixing this so I came up with a rather inelligant, yet effective solution. While it is difficult to see in the photo, The pin that has the bad connection is the ground pin that I soldered the Pin 13 LED to. I must have spent too much time heating that pad up because I was trying to mount the LED to it. Regardless, my rather hoaky fix was to solder a wire onto the to of that pin and stuff the other end of that wire into the DIP socket of the corresponding AVR pin. I checked the continuity with my multimeter and lo and behold it worked without needing me to wiggle the pin until it could chance upon a connection. I proceeded to check the rest of the leads and found them all to be working, so perhaps I'll actually get to use the RBBB for a project sometime in the future.