Category Archives: ATtiny Hacks

Camera Restricta Ensures Original Photography

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Proper documentation is important, and when traveling it is commonly achieved via photography. Redundant documentation is often inefficient, and the Camera Restricta — in a commentary on the saturation of photographed landmarks and a recent debate on photographic censorship in the EU — aims to challenge the photographer into taking unique photographs.

Camera Restricta has a 3D-printed body, housing a smartphone for gps data, display and audio output, while an ATTiny85 serves to control the interdicting function of the camera. When the user sets up to take a picture using Camera Restricta, an app running on the phone queries a …read more

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USB Arduino into AVR TPI Programmer

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Turning an Arduino of virtually any sort into a simple AVR 6-pin ISP programmer is old hat. But when Atmel came out with a series of really tiny AVR chips, the ATtiny10 and friends with only six pins total, they needed a new programming standard. Enter TPI (tiny programming interface), and exit all of your previously useful DIY AVR programmers.

[Kimio Kosaka] wrote a dual-purpose TPI and ISP firmware for the ATmegaxxUn chips that are used as a USB-serial bridge on the Unos, and constitute the only chip on board a Leonardo or Micro. The catch? You’re going to have …read more

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Tiny Game of Simon on an ATtiny13

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How much game can you get out of a chip with only 1 kB of flash memory and (five or) six free GPIOs? Well, you can get it to play the classic memory game, Simon. [Vojtak] is submitting this project for the 1 kB Challenge, but it looks like it’s already been used to teach simple microcontrollering to teenagers as well, so the code is actually straightforward to read, but full of nice features.

Neat tricks include sharing button-press sensing and LED driving on the same pin, which was necessary to make everything work on such a small chip. A …read more

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Tiny Game of Simon on an ATtiny13

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How much game can you get out of a chip with only 1 kB of flash memory and (five or) six free GPIOs? Well, you can get it to play the classic memory game, Simon. [Vojtak] is submitting this project for the 1 kB Challenge, but it looks like it’s already been used to teach simple microcontrollering to teenagers as well, so the code is actually straightforward to read, but full of nice features.

Neat tricks include sharing button-press sensing and LED driving on the same pin, which was necessary to make everything work on such a small chip. A …read more

Continue reading Tiny Game of Simon on an ATtiny13→

Hacking Together a Temperature Sensor for Boiling Milk

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Ever have trouble justifying your hacking to anyone from another generation? [Domen] presented his mother with a custom-made device that monitors the milk temperature as it boils on the stove, preventing boil-over. And he made the device robust, simple to use, and foolproof. To his mom, it must look like he’s a wizard — able to conjure up home electronics out of solder smoke and some plywood.

Of course, we know better. Inside his gadget is a simple temperature sensor, an ATtiny841, a very nice home-made PCB, a buzzer, an LCD, and some pushbuttons. [Domen] rubbed together a few pre-existing …read more

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Another Desktop LED Xmas Tree!

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We love it when someone takes inspiration from one of our posts and comes up with their own twist on it. [Matthew] liked one builds he saw on Hackaday so much, he built his own LED desktop Xmas tree!

[Matthew] was inspired by [designer2k2]’s DIY desktop Xmas tree that was posted in October. To get started, he found a set of concentric WS2812 rings over on Ali Express. The five rings total 93 LEDs, plus a single WS2812 for the top of the tree. He also got a laser cut tree model from Thingiverse and had it cut, combining the …read more

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Modular Tap-Dancing Robot Can Shuffle Ball Change

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Electromechanical solenoids are pretty cool devices. Move some current through an electromagnet and you can push a load around or pull it. If you’re MIT student [Lining Yao], you can use them to dance. [Lining] built TapBot, a re-configurable set of tap-dancing robots that are both modular and modern. She even rolled her own solenoids.

The one with the eye stalk is the bridge, and it’s connected to a computer over FTDI. The other nodes attach to the bridge and each other with small magnets that are designed to flip around freely to make the connections. These links are just …read more

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Modular Tap-Dancing Robot Can Shuffle Ball Change

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Electromechanical solenoids are pretty cool devices. Move some current through an electromagnet and you can push a load around or pull it. If you’re MIT student [Lining Yao], you can use them to dance. [Lining] built TapBot, a re-configurable set of tap-dancing robots that are both modular and modern. She even rolled her own solenoids.

The one with the eye stalk is the bridge, and it’s connected to a computer over FTDI. The other nodes attach to the bridge and each other with small magnets that are designed to flip around freely to make the connections. These links are just …read more

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7 LED’s, 2 Pins – beat that, Charlieplexing

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[Tim]’s Dice10 is an exercise in minimalism. Building an electronic dice using an ATtiny10 with code that fits within 1kB is not too difficult. Charlieplexing the LED’s would have used three of the four available GPIO pins. [Tim] upped the game by using just two GPIO pins to drive the seven LED’s for the dice. A third GPIO is used as a touch button input. Besides the ATtiny and the LED’s, the only other component used is a capacitor across the supply inputs.

The LED’s are grouped in three pairs of two LED’s and a single centre LED. Usually, Charlieplexed …read more

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USB Etch-a-Sketch-Style Mouse is More Analog Than You’d Think

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[Mitxela] wanted to build a different kind of mouse, one that worked like an Etch-a-Sketch toy with one X knob and one Y knob. Armed with some rotary encoders and a microcontroller, that shouldn’t be hard. But when you use a pin-limited ATtiny85, you are going to need some tricks.

The encoders put out a two-bit Gray code and close a button when you depress them. Plus you need some pins for the V-USB stack to handle the USB interface. [Mitxela] decided to convert the encoders  to output analog voltages using a simple resistor DAC. That would only require two …read more

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