When the time comes to go to the store and pick up those chocolates you always get your mother for valentines mother’s day, why not spice them up a little with some LEDs? [Dmitry] shows how you can easily add some flashing lights to the packaging without really modifying it. He’s using an ATtiny13 which only has 5 I/O pins, so he had to charlieplex the LEDs to get all 10 functional. The result is fairly quick and might just show Mom that you really do care.
[via HackedGadgets]
I like the idea of using the space under the uC and inbetween the DIP socket pins to put components in, dead bug soldering can produce some neat results but this way you can easily recover the uC when the novelty has worn off.
Ooh! Blinky!
You won’t catch ME giving non blinking chocolates to anybody again.
The Tiny13 has 6 available tristate output pins if you blow the RSTDISBL fuse, so you can therefore drive 30 LEDs from one 8-pin part. This looks pretty cool and is quite good for baffling hardware engineers.