ATtiny Hacks: ATtiny-controlled 4x4x4 LED Cube Has A Unique Design

September 21, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

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[Tom] recently started experimenting with Charlieplexing, and wrote in to share the 4x4x4 cube he built with an ATtiny24. Similar to this minimalist 4x4x4 LED cube we featured the other day, [Tom’s] version attempts to use the least pins possible to drive the LEDs, but in a different manner.

[Tom] didn’t want to sacrifice brightness, so he decided that the LEDs would have a 1/8 duty cycle. The problem is that the ATtiny’s I/O ports can’t support that kind of current so he needed a different means of driving the LEDs. Rather than employ any sort of shift register to control the LEDs, he opted to exclusively use transistors as he had done in previous projects.

For his Charlieplexed cube to use a total of 9 I/O pins he had to get creative with his design. He broke each level of the structure into two non-connected groups of LEDs, utilizing diagonal interconnects to get everything wired up properly.

It seems to work quite nicely as you can see in the video below. While it uses two more I/O lines than the other ATtiny cube we featured recently, we love the simple, shift register-less design.

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ATtiny Hacks: BEES! An Electronic Scale To See Who Brings In More Honey.

September 20, 2011 by Nick Schulze 19 Comments

[MakingThingsWork] wanted an accurate way to keep track of the weight of his beehive, so he decided to build himself a data logging electronic scale. First he ripped the strain gauges from an old electronic scale which he then fitted to his home made beehive base. He then went about designing and building the control board which is based about the Attiny 85 (if you hadn’t guessed by the banner). An instrumentation amplifier was used to amplify the signal from the strain gauge, which is then read by the ADC on the Attiny. It looks like he had some trouble getting consistent results from the scale, so to eliminate the error caused by temperature variations he set up a fixed voltage divider for reference. With this setup the scale can produce results at +/- 0.5lb accuracy, sounds just fine for a system that cost less than $50. The V-usb project software has been used to connect the scale to his PC which he uses to collect and graph the data. All in all a very neat project and by the looks of it, some very productive bees.

ATtiny Hacks: Simple USB Temperature Probe

September 17, 2011 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

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[Dan’s] office is awfully hot, but he needed some real temperature numbers that he could show the building management office to justify opening a maintenance ticket. He had seen some simple temperature probe examples online, and decided to build his own using a small AVR chip.

Based off a similar temperature monitoring example called EasyLogger, his temperature probe uses an LM34 temperature sensor, which is wired to an ATtiny45. The ATtiny communicates with his computer using the Ruby-USB library in conjunction with a bit of Ruby code he put together. Once the data is obtained, all of the temperature measurements are logged and graphed using RubyRRDTool.

As you can see by in the image above, his office is far hotter than it should be, so we’re pretty sure he’s happy to have actual measurements to back up his claims.

If you are looking to make a small temperature probe of your own, his code, schematics, and links to all of the tools he used in the project are available on his site.

ATtiny Hacks: Roll 2d6 With An ATtiny

September 16, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

A pair of 6-sided electric dice (original in Dutch, here’s the Google Translate link) was sent in on the tip line for our ATtiny hacks theme. We really appreciate the simplicity of the circuit; it really shows how the complexity of discrete components can be cut down with a simple microcontroller.

The circuit is very simple – An ATtiny26 serves as the core of the project. Fourteen LEDs are connected to fourteen pins on the micro. The tiny26 might be a bit overkill. With Charlieplexing, we suspect this build could have been completed with an 8-pin micro like an ATtiny25. The code for the build (written in BASIC with BASCOM-AVR), board files and schematics have all been posted.

We’ve seen a few electronic dice builds before. this build uses an ATmega328 in a hugely overwrought circuit. Compared to what can be done with a 555, the ATtiny26 build provides a very nice middle ground.

Thanks [Roeland] for sending this in.

ATtiny Hacks: An Audio Alert For Cell Phones Accidentally Left On Vibrate

September 15, 2011 by Mike Nathan 31 Comments

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[John Thomson] usually keeps his phone on vibrate when it’s in his pocket, and he often forgets to turn the ringer back on when setting it down to charge. This typically results in a bunch of missed calls in the meantime, so he had to devise a way to counteract his forgetfulness.

You might remember [John] from the Santa-pede contest we held last December. He wanted to try his hand at yet another competition, the Avnet Dog Days of Summer contest, so he scrambled to come up with a quick fix for his situation. He concocted a simple circuit based on [ChaN’s] design for a “Simple SD Audio Player with an 8-pin IC” that would alert him to incoming calls, even when his phone was on vibrate.

[John] used an ATtiny85, just as [ChaN] did, adding a speaker for sound output and a piezo sensor to detect his phone’s vibrations. When the piezo senses a bit of motion, the audio player kicks in, blaring a series of sounds that are sure to get [John’s] attention.

ATTiny Hacks: Run Your Arduino Project On An ATTiny!

September 13, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 45 Comments

Yup. We have all been there. You throw together a really elaborate Arduino project that only really needs a couple pins, far fewer than the Arduino’s native microcontrollers have to offer. Well fear not, [Thatcher] has solved just this problem by adding some ATTtiny cores to the Arduino IDE. His blog details the process from grabbing the MIT developed core files and loading them up in your Arduino software directories. The modification looks simple and although [Thatcher] shows the whole process on a Mac it only involves unzipping and tossing files into a folder. With ATTiny chips only a few bucks each this is perfect for those simple software driven hacks that don’t require an entire Uno duct taped to the outside of an enclosure. Nice work [Thatcher]!

Announcing Our Next Theme: ATtiny Hacks

September 12, 2011 by Jack Buffington 34 Comments

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It is time once again to announce a new theme. This time around, we have chosen to highlight projects built around the ATtiny series of processors. These are 6 to 32 pin AVR processors that run up to 16 MHz and have anywhere from 512 Bytes of flash with 32 Bytes of RAM to 16K of Flash with 512 bytes of RAM. We’re guessing that this will be a pretty popular theme since so many people are using Atmel processors these days. If you have a project that you would like to see on Hackaday that is using an ATtiny processor, please hit us up on our tip line. If we like it, we may we choose to feature it in one of our daily themed hacks.

To kick off this theme, here is a nice write up about a stepper motor driver based around the ATtiny13. This project reads the analog value on pin B4 and adjusts the speed of the stepper motor. It is well documented and includes source code.