There are smaller microcontrollers than the ATtiny13. Some ARM chips will fit on the head of a large pin, and even in Atmel world, the ATtiny10 comes in a tiny SOT-23-6 package – a size normally reserved for surface mount transistors. The ‘tiny13, though, can be programmed with just about any ISP and comes in an 8-pin DIP. It’s the bare minimum if you’re looking to break out of the world of Arduino, and you can do some pretty cool things with it, like playing some holiday audio with an SPI Flash chip.

[Vinod] tried opening up a cheap camera pen, but in the course of disassembly a few traces broke. He was now left with a 4Mbit SPI Flash chip. This was obviously the time to investigate what could be done with a small microcontroller and a huge amount of Flash. and the Attiny13 audio player was born.

The circuit uses one PWM for audio out, and reads audio directly from the Flash chip. The UART on board the ‘tiny13 is used to update the Flash, and there’s also a switch to select between play and record. If you’re counting, that means there are 4 pins for the Flash, 2 pins for the UART, 1 for the switch, one for the audio output, and the power and ground rails, all in an 8-pin package. That’s a pretty cool way to use one pin for two different functions.

You can check out a video of the project in action below.