ATtiny Hacks: SerialCouple – A Standalone Thermocouple ADC Board With Serial Out

September 23, 2011 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

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Since we are in the midst of featuring a wide assortment of ATtiny hacks, [Kenneth] wrote in to share a project he has been developing over the last few months, the SerialCouple.

Most all development platforms have the ability to function as an analog to digital converter, but you don’t always need a full-featured board when all you require is serial output for your computer. With his SerialCouple board, [Kenneth] is trying to take some complexity out of the process by building a standalone thermocouple ADC board. The SerialCouple is designed to take analog readings from a thermocouple, converting them to digital values that can be sent to any device over a serial connection. The grunt work is done by a Maxim MAX31855 chip, which converts the thermocouple’s analog data to digital temperature readings. The digital representation of the temperature is then retrieved by the on-board ATtiny2313, which sends the data out the serial port.

If a standalone thermocouple ADC board is something you’ve been looking for, be sure to swing by his site to take a look at his code and schematics.

Continue reading to see a short video demo that explains how the SerialCouple works.

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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.

VGA Video Output With An ATtiny

August 31, 2011 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

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[Fernando] is working on creating a game at home, with live scoring displayed on a large LCD TV. He’s keeping mum as to what the game entails, but he was more than happy to spill the details on how he planned to use the television as a wireless scoreboard.

The writeup is the first part in what will likely be a substantial series of progress reports, covering how he used an ATtiny45 to drive his LCD display. Eventually, the scoreboard will use a Bluetooth adapter for wireless input, but his immediate goal was to get the display running properly.

He explains how he uses the tiny micro and its limited set of I/O pins to drive the display, dipping into some of the technical details along the way. He discusses how he worked out the timings of the VSYNC and HSYNC pulsing, as well as how how the characters are actually drawn on the screen.

The article isn’t overly heavy on the technical details, and he has sample code available so you can take a look at how the VGA magic was done, so be sure to check it out.

Tiny External System Monitor Makes It Easy To Keep Tabs On Your PC

August 2, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

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Instructables user [Jan] likes to keep close tabs on his computer’s memory usage, but wanted something more interesting to look at than the standard resource manager. He preferred to have an external display available that would show his computer’s status with a quick glance, and thus this system monitor was born.

His status panel contains a trio of constantly updated LED bars that show his computer’s CPU usage, available physical memory, and virtual memory consumption. With a small footprint being a priority, [Jan] kept the indicator’s size down by using SMD components and by including an on-board UART to USB converter to go along with his ATTiny microcontroller.

He uses a Python script to gather usage information from his computer, feeding it to his display over USB. The system works pretty well as you can see in the video below, though the virtual memory indicator doesn’t seem to get a ton of action – perhaps it could be used to indicate hard drive activity instead.

If you are looking to build something similar, [Jan] has made all of his code and schematics available for anyone’s use.

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A Study In AVR Power Saving Techniques

July 26, 2011 by Mike Nathan 88 Comments

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[Scott] found the iCufflinks from Adafruit Industries pretty interesting, but he thought that the stated run time of 24 hours was a bit short. He figured he could improve the product’s power consumption at least a little bit, to improve the overall battery life.

From their schematics, he placed an order for parts and built two identical iCufflink mock-ups side by side – one running their code and one running his. He took baseline current draw measurements, then got busy slimming down the cufflinks’ software. It had been 20 years since he touched assembly, and he has never written it for an AVR, but judging by his work he’s not rusty in the least.

He slowed the ATtiny’s clock down and tweaked a few other settings for a savings of 53μA, but the real improvements came via a fairly simple fix. The original code called for the processor to institute a counting loop to sleep, which he found to be very wasteful. Instead, he chose to put the processor in an idle state, using the chip’s watchdog timer to wake it when it was time to pulse the LED. The power savings from this change alone was a whopping 261μA!

When he was said and done, the changes save about 315μA of current draw, and should allow the cufflinks to run for up to 38 hours without swapping batteries. In [Scott’s] opinion, a nearly 60% improvement in battery life is pretty good for a day’s work, and we’re inclined to agree.

Digital Cootie Detector

July 25, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 19 Comments

Kids love games of exclusion. This usually manifests itself in games of ‘keep away,’ having someone ‘catch cooties,’ or the ever-popular ‘No Brian club.’ [Rob] wrote in to tell us about the digital cootie detector he built. The cootie detector operates on galvanic skin response. It’s actually very similar to an E-Meter, although instead of Thetans this device measures something that actually exists.

Galvanic skin response is a measure of the skin’s conductivity. Skin conductivity changes because sweat glands will be activated when someone is nervous. This is a measure of psychological arousal, making it a great detector for games of exclusion – a kid who doesn’t want cooties will ‘psych themself out’ and give themselves cooties.

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