keithWelp, I got impatient, and went to Radio Shack to buy their soldering station. I still have mine coming in the mail, but its ground from Arizona, which may as well be ground from Alaska.
I soldered the header pins onto the board, and also managed to solder the memory chip on the Sparkfun PCB as well. This stuff is tiny, but fairly managable. I used a naked-eye to do the work, checking it with a magnifying glass.
So far so good. Everything has continuity from chip to the solderless breadboard, and there are no shorts….
Stay tuned as I try to use this memory to see if I didn’t fry anything.
Great news. I’m successfully communicating with the FRAM. I managed to store and retrieve two different values in two different locations. Also managed to grab the “status register” from the chip as well.
I’m sort of cheating, in that I’m using SX/B to do my tests with SHIFTIN and SHIFTOUT, but its working. This tells me my soldering, hardware config, cabling, etc is all correct.
SHIFTIN/SHIFTOUT uses a much slower datarate, but I’m guessing not much should change if I speed things up.
My final code will all be assembly, and I’ll be writing some modular code routines that should make things easy to debug and maintain.