Today I went out to my local electronics store and bought a 15/30 watt
iron, thin rosin core solder, veroboard, some capacitors, ressistors,
IC sockets and pin headers. I took a deep breath and attached my thin
tip to my soldering iron and started soldering stuff onto my
veroboard. I started to solder the first few pins of my IC socket, I
formed a few solder bridges between pins, added too much solder and
too little on other pins. Those were not too difficult to fix with a
little fiddling. By the fifth or sixth pin, my joints were soldering
perfectly. I took all the valuable advice and knowledge that you all
have given me and soldered the pull up resistors, decoupling
capacitors and everything else.

This was the moment of truth. I plugged in my PICKIT2 to the pin
headers on my veroboard. Hopefully I didn't miss any short circuits
during inspection. I downloaded the PICKIT2 operating system. Good. It
verified. Then I loaded up my program and ran it. I hooked up my
multimeter to the output pins and tested every one of them. Everything
was functioning perfectly. I even added delay loops to make sure code
was actually running. Everything worked great.

This is my first ever "mini" project, and thanks to everyone's help
here, it turned out perfectly.

Now I'm going to make another header for UART
(http://www.electro-tech-online.com/micro-controllers/39174-pickit-2-usart-example.html)
and test it with my PICKIT2.

I'll post a picture of what I have very soon. I'm getting a lot closer
to my calculator project. Now all I need to do is go get a
potentiometer and connect my LCD, perfect the code, add some buttons
and I'm done.

Thanks again to everyone!
-- 
solarwind
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