ATtiny Hacks

279 Articles

Electronic Float Valve Keeps The Horse’s Feet Dry

November 5, 2015 by 31 Comments

[Bob] built this simple device that can best be described as an electronic float valve. He was wasting a lot of water from overflowing water troughs and buckets around his farm. He would usually put the hose in the container, turn on the water valve and carry on with his work. By the time he remembered to come back, the area would be flooded. It’s obvious that there’s many different ways to solve a problem. For example, a simple mechanical float valve might have worked, but it’s not horse friendly and liable to get damaged soon.

The electronics is unabashedly minimal. An ATtiny85 controls a relay via a common variety NPN transistor. The relay in turn switches the solenoid valve. A push-button tells the microcontroller to start the water flowing, and when the water level gets high enough that it touches two hose clamps, the micro shuts it off again.

There’s some ghetto engineering going on here. The electronics is driven by a 9V battery, although the relay and the solenoid valve that [Bob] used are both rated for 12V. He’s not even using any sort of voltage regulation for the ATtiny, but instead dropping the voltage with a resistor divider. (We wonder about battery life in the long run.)

He built all of it on perf board and stuffed it inside a small enclosure, with two wires coming out for the level sensor and another two for the solenoid, and it seems to work. Check the video below where [Bob] walks through his build.

While some may point out the many short comings in this build, [Bob] found the one solution that works for him. Sometimes the right solution is what you’ve got on hand, and we’re glad he’s hacking away and sharing his work. And check out this wireless water level sensor that he built some time back.

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Teach An ATTiny 85 To Swear

October 21, 2015 by 31 Comments

Let’s be honest here: one of the first things we all did when we came across speech synthesizers like the Speak-n-spell was to try swear words. [Alec Smecher] has taken this to heart, building a simple buzzer mechanism driven by an ATTiny 85 that swears repeatedly when you connect it. It is a rather simple project (or, as [Alec] himself says, it is “a satisfyingly minimalist build”), but it is quite nicely done.

The 8kHz speech sample (taken from Google Translate) is stored in the code, and written out to one of the PWM outputs of the ATTiny85 from a timing loop to directly drive the small speaker. So, all that is needed is the buzzer case, a small speaker, the ATTiny85, a power source and a few bits of wire. It’s a great example of a minimalist design: the ATTiny85 can just about drive the speaker directly, and can be run directly from batteries without requiring a power controller. Sometimes it pays to keep things simple, especially when it comes to swearing. 

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A Thousand LED Lights For Your Room

October 3, 2015 by 18 Comments

Sure, you could get a regular light fixture like a normal person… Or you could use close to a thousand RGB LEDs to light your room!

That’s what [Dmitry] decided to do after trying to figure out the best way to light his pad. You see, his room is 4 by 4 meters, and WS2812 RGB LED strips happen to come in 4 meter lengths… Coincidence? We think not.

The problem with using 16 meters of LED strips is powering them… You see, at 16 meters, you’re looking at about 5V @ 57.6A — and we’re guessing you probably don’t have a 5V 60A power supply handy. Not to mention if you run them in series, the resistance of the system is going to kill your efficiency and the last LEDs probably won’t even work… So [Dmitry] had to break the system up. He has two power supplies feeding the strips from the middle of each pair — that way, he doesn’t have to worry about any voltage drops due to the length of the strips.

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relay

Controlling Mains Power Rube Goldberg Style

September 21, 2015 by 19 Comments

[g3gg0] has some nice radio equipment including an AOR AR-5000 receiver and a HiQ SDR. They are so nice that it appears they lack an on/off switch. [g3gg0] grew tired of unplugging the things, and decided to nerdify his desk with a switch that would turn his setup on and off for him. He decided to accomplish this task by emulating the Scroll, Number and Caps Lock LEDs on his keyboard via a Digispark board. He uses the LEDs to issue commands to the Digispark allowing him to control a 5V relay, which sits between it and the AC.

Starting off with some USB keyboard emulation code on the Digispark, he tweaked it so he could use the Scroll Lock LED as sort of a Chip Select. Once this is pressed, he can use the Caps Lock and the Number Lock LED to issue commands to the Digispark.

It’s programmed to only stay on for a total of 5 hours in case he forgets to turn it off. Let us know what you think about this interesting approach.

Sense Hat Lights Up Pi

September 13, 2015 by 15 Comments

One of our chief complaints about the Raspberry Pi is it doesn’t have a lot of I/O. There are plenty of add ons, of course to expand the I/O capabilities. The actual Raspberry Pi foundation recently created the Sense Hat which adds a lot of features to a Pi, although they might not be the ones we would have picked. The boards were made for the AstroPi project (the project that allowed UK schools to run experiments in space). They don’t appear to be officially for sale to the public yet, but according to their site, they will be selling them soon. Update: Despite some pages on the Raspberry Pi site saying they aren’t out yet, they apparently are.

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A Tale Of Three Soldering Iron Controllers

September 2, 2015 by 33 Comments

[ZL2PD] needed to replace an old Weller soldering station and decided not to go with one of the cheap soldering stations you can find all over the Internet. He has a long story about why he had to design his own controller, but you never have to explain that to us. He kept detailed notes of his journey and in the end, he built three different controllers before settling on one.

He started with a Hakko hand piece that uses a thermistor for temperature measurements. The first iteration of the controller had analog controls. He wasn’t happy with the number of parts in the design and the simple LED display. That led him to replace the controller with an ATTiny CPU and a use a serial LCD.

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Clocking (or Overclocking) An AVR

August 4, 2015 by 26 Comments

Some guys build hot rods in their garage. Some guys overclock their PCs to ridiculously high clock frequencies (ahem… we might occasionally be guilty of this). [Nerd Ralph] decided to push an ATTiny13a to over twice its rated frequency.

It didn’t seem very difficult. [Ralph] used a 44.2 MHz can oscillator and set the device to use an external clock. He tested with a bit-banged UART and it worked as long as he kept the supply voltage at 5V. He also talks about some other ways to hack out an external oscillator to get higher than stock frequencies.

We wouldn’t suggest depending on an overclock on an important or commercial project. There could be long term effects or subtle issues. Naturally, you can’t depend on every part working the same at an untested frequency, either. But we’d be really interested in hear how you would test this overclocked chip for adverse effects.

Now, if you are just doing this for sport, a little liquid nitrogen will push your Arduino to 65 MHz (see the video after the break). We’ve covered pushing a 20MHz AVR to 30MHz before, but that’s a little less ratio than [Ralph] achieved.

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