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Clock projects are so common that they are almost a cliche. After all, microcontrollers have some clock source and are good at counting, so it stands to reason that a clock is an obvious project. [WilkoL’s] clock though has a most unusual clock source: a 440 Hz tuning fork.

A cheap plastic dome really shows off the fork and contributes to this good-looking build. An ATTiny13 divides the input frequency down, handles the display, and obeys the adjustment buttons. It does require a little metalworking, as the tuning fork needed filing and threading, although we bet you could figure out other ways to mount it.

As good as the clock looks, it is apparently impractical. The problem is that 440 Hz tone is audible. If you think a ticking clock will drive you mad, try a constant 440 Hz tone.

We were amused with the fact that the tuning forks were both a little low so they were tuned by filing material off the ends. Of course, the frequency is only set at a particular temperature and as it gets warmer or colder you might see some drift, but apparently not too much.

A more common choice is a crystal, which usually has a much higher frequency. Sometimes the clock source is the power mains.

Tags:  attiny hacks  

An uninterruptible power supply (UPS) isn’t something solely to have hooked up to your desktop PC. Your Raspberry Pi SBC might also benefit from it. Yet the available options aren’t too great, or are too expensive. This leads folk including [Joachim Baumann] to modify cheerfully cheap Chinese UPS HAT boards such as the Geekworm UPS HAT to fix its myriad of issues and missing features.

Inspired by a number of other hacks on this board which fixed things like needing to push a button on the UPS to boot the Raspberry Pi, [Joachim] set out to make a similar ATtiny-based solution that would address all issues, above all the fact that this Geekworm UPS does not detect when the connected SBC has turned off and will happily run the lithium battery pack dry. Finding a blog post by Simon who had reverse-engineered the board previously was immensely helpful.

With [Simon]’s project, a PIC MCU was used to provide a supervisor for the UPS HAT. It also bypasses the HAT’s control over whether the Raspberry Pi gets power or not. The results did however not fit [Joachim]’s needs, so the ATtiny Daemon project was born. This uses some of the fixes [Simon] implemented and adds a daemon that runs on the Raspberry Pi to establish two-way communications between the UPS and OS.

The final schematics for the project.

The settings for the UPS are stored also on the HAT, in the MCU’s EEPROM, with the daemon able to update and read it out as needed. The completed system provides a whole list of new features, as listed on the above linked Github project page. Probably most important are thresholds for warning, hard shutdowns and restart. The entire add-on board is also laid out to use only through-hole components, making it very easy for even novices to assemble.

The completed and assembled board, without installed ATtiny MCU.

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[Paul Klinger] can’t seem to get enough of building tiny, amazing gaming rigs, and we love him for that. They combine two of our favorites: miniatures and portable gaming. His newest creation honors the form of the formidable ThinkPad.

Of course it has the red nipple and lid LED—wouldn’t be a ThinkPad without ’em. ThinkTiny’s nipple is a 5-way joystick that plays Snake, Tetris, Lunar Lander, and more on an OLED screen. Like its predecessor the Tiny PC, [Paul] used an ATtiny1614, which (FYI) has a new one-wire UDPI interface. He can easily reprogram it through pogo pin holes built into the case.

There are some nice stylistic details at play here, too. The lid LED is both delivered and diffused by a 2mm grain of fiber-optic cable. And [Paul] printed the cover with a color change to transparent filament to make the Think logo and the charging LEDs shine through. Maneuver your way past the break to see it in action.

If you haven’t leveled up to AVR programming yet, introduce yourself to Arduboy.

Tags:  attiny hacks  

You might think the game of Rock Paper Scissors is just the random chance, but that’s not true. There is a strategy for Rock Paper Scissors, multiple ones in fact, and the best human players can consistently beat any Joe Schmoe off the street. But what about computers? [Paul] answered that question with a tiny little keychain dongle that can beat you at Rock Paper Scissors.

This is a neural network, and you need to train a neural network, so where did [Paul] get all that data? roshambo.me offers thousands of paper rock scissor games, and trained the network on more than 85,000 human games, along with about 10,000 simulated games. Rock Paper Scissors isn’t a complicated game at all, and the entire neural network is stored on an ATtiny1614 microcontroller. The calculations are done as floats, even. That’s how non-computationally intensive this project is.

Building a neural network is one thing, but putting it in a handy keychain enclosure is something else. This handsome device fits on a PCB just larger than a 2032 coin cell battery and is enclosed in a 3D printed case. The buttons are 3D printed as well, with some clever application of fiber optic as light pipes for the LEDs. The end result is something that is slightly better than random chance at Rock Paper Scissors and shows off some matrix programming skills. Check out the video below.

Tags:  attiny hacks  

We recently heard it said of a hacker who pulled off a particularly nice VGA hack on an 8-bit microcontroller: “He knows all the bits, personally.” High praise, indeed. If you want to get on a first-name basis with a ton of transistors, then have a look at [Heinz D]’s Vacation Course in ATtiny13 Assembler (original in German, translated into English by robots here).

But be warned, this isn’t the easy way to learn AVRs. Not content with simply stripping away every layer of abstraction, this month-long “course” in AVR assembly starts off programming the chip initially with just two pushbuttons in its native machine language of high and low voltages. But still, especially if you can get a few assignments done in one sitting, you’re writing in the relative splendor of assembly language and uploading code with a proper programmer before long, because there’s a real limit to how much code one can toggle in before going mad.

There’s a beautiful minimalism to this entirely ground-up approach, and maybe it’s an appropriate starting point for learning how the machine works at its lowest level. At any rate, you’ll be able to lord it over the Arduino crew that you were able to get blink.ino up and running with just a pair of mechanical contacts and a battery. Real programmers…

And once you’ve mastered AVR assembly language, you can recycle those two buttons to learn I2C or SPI. What other protocols are there that don’t have prohibitive timeouts? What’s the craziest code that you’ve ever entered bit by bit?

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There’s nothing wrong with building something just to build it, but there’s something especially satisfying about being able to solve a real-world problem with a piece of gear you’ve designed and fabricated. When all the traditional methods to keep birds from roosting on his mother’s property failed, [MNMakerMan] decided to come up with a more persuasive option: a solar powered spinning owl complete with expandable batons.

We imagine the owl isn’t strictly necessary when you’re whacking the birds with a metal bar to begin with, but it does add a nice touch. Perhaps it will even serve to deter some of the less adventurous birds before they get within clobbering distance, which is probably in their best interest. [MNMakerMan] says the rotation speed of the bars seems low enough that he doesn’t think it will do the birds any physical harm, but it’s still got to be fairly unpleasant.

At first glance you might think that this contraption simply spins when the small 10 watt photovoltaic panel next to it catches the sun, but there’s actually a bit more to it than that. Sure he probably could just have it spin constantly whenever the sun is up, but instead [MNMakerMan] is using a ATtiny85 to control the 11 RPM geared DC motor with a IRF540 MOSFET. By adding a DS3231 RTC module into the mix, he’s able to not only accurately control when the spinner begins and ends its bird-busting shift, but implement timed patterns rather than running it the whole time. All of which can of course be fine-tuned by adjusting a couple variables and reflashing the chip.

We’ve seen plenty of automated systems for keeping cats away, and of course squirrels are a common target for such builds as well, but devices to deter birds are considerably less common among these pages. So it would seem that, at least for now, [MNMakerMan] has the market cornered on solar bird smashing gadgets. We’re sure Mom’s very proud.

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Like most of his work, this tiny two-digit thermometer shows that [David Johnson-Davies] has a knack for projects that make efficient use of hardware. No pin is left unused between the DS18B20 temperature sensor, the surface mount seven-segment LED displays, and the ATtiny84 driving it all. With the temperature flashing every 24 seconds and the unit spending the rest of the time in a deep sleep, a good CR2032 coin cell should power the device for nearly a year. The board itself measures only about an inch square.

You may think that a display that flashes only once every 24 seconds might be difficult to actually read in practice, and you’d be right. [David] found that it was indeed impractical to watch the display, waiting an unknown amount of time to read some briefly-flashed surprise numbers. To solve this problem, the decimal points flash shortly before the temperature appears. This countdown alerts the viewer to an incoming display, at the cost of a virtually negligible increase to the current consumption.

[David]’s project write-up explains how everything functions. He also steps through the different parts of the source code to explain how everything works, including the low power mode. The GitHub repository holds all the source files, and the board can also be ordered direct from OSH Park via their handy shared projects feature.

Low power consumption adds complexity to projects, but the payoffs can easily be worth the time spent implementing them. We covered a detailed look into low power WiFi microcontrollers that is still relevant, and projects like this weather station demonstrate practical low power design work.

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[David Johnson-Davies] always wanted an illuminated button matrix for projects, but cost was never very friendly. That all changed when he discovered a cheap source of illuminated pushbuttons on Aliexpress, leading to this DIY 4×4 illuminated button matrix design which communicates over I²C. The button states can be read independently of setting the light pattern, and an optional interrupt signal gets pulled low whenever there is a change detected. Not bad for one PCB plus about $10-worth in components!

The device uses every single pin on an ATtiny88, and because each button gets its own pin the keypresses can be detected with pin-change interrupts. The state reporting of buttons over I²C is unambiguous, even when multiple buttons are pressed simultaneously. A simple protocol provides all the needed functionality, and all connections are brought to the board’s edge to allow for easily tiling multiple panels.

The GitHub repository contains the code and PCB files and [David] helpfully shared the board files to OSH Park and PCBWay for easy ordering. In addition, he provides two demos (Tacoyaki and Tacoyaki+) which are games related to the classic Lights Out to show off the matrix.

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Inspiration can come from anywhere. Sometimes it’s just a matter of seeing an interesting part that you want to fiddle around with badly enough that you end up developing a whole idea, and potentially product, around it. That’s how [Bobricius] found himself creating this very slick little warning beacon, and looking at the end result, we think he made the right decision.

The Kingbright DLC-6SRD “jumbo” LED is actually six individual emitters built into a plastic diffuser. Interfacing with the device is simple enough; each LED has its normal anode and cathode leg, all you need to do is power them up. What [Bobricius] has created is a simple PCB design that the DLC-6SRD can plug right into, complete with a 2032 coin cell holder on the opposite side.

Of course, just lighting up all six elements at the same time wouldn’t be very interesting. [Bobricius] is controlling them individually right off of the digital pins of an ATtiny10 with the help of some Charlieplexing. This makes all kinds of interesting patterns possible, and as demonstrated in the video after the break, the current iteration of the project uses some very simple code to “rotate” the LED as if it was the flasher on an emergency vehicle.

The addition of a few blinking LEDs can make a world of difference in terms of nighttime visibility, so a cheap stick-on module that adds such a distinctive light pattern could be a very important safety device. It could also be useful for UAVs, following the FAA’s new rules which would mandate anti-collision lights for night flying.

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Most of us are aware that charlieplexing can drive a large number of LEDs from a relatively small number of I/O pins, but [David Johnson-Davies] demonstrates adding another dimension to that method to create individually controlled PWM outputs as well. His ATtiny85 has twelve LEDs, each with individually-set brightness levels, …read more

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There are applications you can download for your smartphone that can “roll” an arbitrary number of dice with whatever number of sides you could possibly want. It’s faster and easier than throwing physical dice around, and you don’t have to worry about any of them rolling under the couch. No matter how you look at it, it’s really a task better performed by software than hardware. All that being said, there’s something undeniably appealing about the physical aspect of die rolling when playing a game.

Luckily, [Paul Klinger] thinks he has the solution to the problem. His design combines the …read more

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When writing code for the ATtiny family of microcontrollers such as a the ATtiny85 or ATtiny10, people usually use one of two methods: they either add support for the chip in the Arduino IDE, or they crack open their text editor of choice and do everything manually. Plus of course there are the stragglers out there using Eclipse. But [Wayne Holder] thinks there’s a better way.

The project started out as a simple way for [Wayne] to program the ATtiny10 in C under Mac OS, but has since evolved into an open source, cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE) for programming …read more

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Used in everything from calculators to military hardware, the 3LS363A is an interesting piece of vintage hardware. With a resolution of 5 x 7 (plus a decimal point), the Soviet-made displays contain no electronics and are simply an array of 36 green LEDs. It’s not hard to drive one of them in a pinch, but [Dmitry Grinberg] thought this classic device deserved a bit better than the minimum.

He’s developed a small board that sits behind the 3LS363A and allows you to control it over I2C for a much more modern experience when working with these vintage displays. Powered by …read more

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Microcontrollers are small, no one is arguing that. On a silicon wafer the size of a grain of rice, you can connect a GPS tracker to the Internet. Put that in a package, and you can put the Internet of Things into something the size of a postage stamp. There’s one microcontroller that’s smaller than all the others. It’s the ATtiny10, and its brethren the ATtiny4, 5, and 9. It comes in an SOT-23-6 package, a size that’s more often seen in packages for single transistors. It’s not very capable, but it is very small. It’s also very weird, with …read more

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Interfacing with the outside world is a fairly common microcontroller task. Outside of certain use cases microcontrollers are arguably primarily useful because of how easily they can interface with other devices. If we just wanted to read and write some data we wouldn’t have gotten that Arduino! But some tasks are more common than others; for instance we’re used to being on the master side of the interface equation, not the slave side. (That’s the job for the TI engineer who designed the temperature sensor, right?) As [Pat] discovered when mocking out a missing SPI GPIO extender, sometimes playing the …read more

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We live in a day when it is very inexpensive to buy an oscilloscope, especially one with modest performance that hooks to a laptop. However, there was a time when even a surplus scope was out of reach for many people who liked to build things. A common alternative was the logic probe. At the low end, this could be an inverter and an LED, although it was more common to have a little extra circuitry to actually do a comparison to a reference voltage and present some indication of fast pulses — you might not be able to tell …read more

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Over the last year or so, cordless portable soldering irons have become all the rage. In fact, at this point a good number of Hackaday readers out there have likely traded in their full-size AC irons for a DC iron that’s only slightly larger than a pen. But before the big boom in portable irons, in the ye olden days of 2014, we brought you word of the open source Solderdoodle created by [Isaac Porras]. Based upon the Weller BP645 and featuring a 3D printed case, the DIY iron was designed to be charged from a standard USB port.

Now, …read more

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Entries into the Circuit Sculpture Contest tend to be pretty minimalist by nature, and this LED candle by [Amal Mathew] is a perfect example. The idea here was to recreate the slim and uncomplicated nature of a real candle but with a digital twist, and we think he’s pulled it off nicely with a bare minimum part count and exaggerated wire length that gives it the look of a thin pillar candle.

To give the LED a fading effect, [Amal] uses a ATtiny85 programmed with the Arduino IDE. His code uses the analogWrite() in a loop to gradually increase and …read more

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[Robson Couto] recently found himself in need of MIDI interface for a project he was working on, but didn’t want to buy one just to use it once; we’ve all been there. Being the creative fellow that he is, he decided to come up with something that not only used the parts he had on-hand but could be completed in one afternoon. Truly a hacker after our own hearts.

Searching around online, he found documentation for using an ATtiny microcontroller as a MIDI interface using V-USB. He figured it shouldn’t be too difficult to adapt that project to run on …read more

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Small I2C OLED displays are common nowadays, and thanks to the work of helpful developers, there are also a variety of graphics libraries for using them. Most of them work by using a RAM buffer, which means that anything one wants to draw gets written to a buffer representing the screen, and the contents of that buffer are copied out to the display whenever it is updated. The drawback is that for some microcontrollers, there simply isn’t enough RAM for this approach to work. For example, a 128×64 monochrome OLED requires a 1024 byte buffer, but that’s bad news if …read more

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There are a few different ways of getting firmware onto one of AVR’s ATtiny85 microcontrollers, including bootloaders that allow for firmware to be updated without the need to plug the chip into a programmer. However, [casanovg] wasn’t satisfied with those so he sent us a tip letting us know he wrote an I2C bootloader for the ATtiny85 called Timonel. It takes into account a few particulars of the part, such as the fact that it lacks a protected memory area where a bootloader would normally reside, and it doesn’t have a native I2C interface, only the USI (Universal Serial …read more

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We’ve all seen a movie or TV show that got our imagination going, and the more studious of us might get fired up over a good book (one without pictures, even). You never know were inspiration might come from, which is why it’s so hard to track down in the first place. But one place we don’t often hear about providing many hackers with project ideas is the grocery store. But of course the more we learn about [Michael Kohn], the more we realize he’s got a very unique vision.

On a recent trip to the grocery store, [Michael] saw …read more

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The “Rubber Ducky” by Hak5 is a very powerful tool that lets the user perform rapid keystroke injection attacks, which is basically a fancy way of saying the device can type fast. Capable of entering text at over 1000 WPM, Mavis Beacon’s got nothing on this $45 gadget. Within just a few seconds of plugging it in, a properly programmed script can do all sorts of damage. Just think of all the havoc that can be caused by an attacker typing in commands on the local machine, and now image they are also the Flash.

But unless you’re a professional …read more

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In your living room, the big display is what you want. But in an embedded project, often less is more. We think [bobricius] will agree since he submitted a tiny 4×5 LED display into our square inch challenge. The board features an ATtiny CPU and twenty SMD LEDs in a nice grid. You can see them in action, scrolling to some disco music in the video below.

There is plenty of room left in the CPU for bigger text strings — the flash memory is just over 10% full. A little side-mounted header makes it easy to program the chip …read more

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One of the first things anyone with an interest in electronics learns is the resistor colour code. The colour of the first band reveals the first figure, the second the subsequent figure, and the third a power-of-ten multiplier. At first you learn these colours, but eventually you just recognise the values through familiarity. You don’t have to think about multipliers when you see orange-orange-red, you just know that it’s a 3K3 resistor.

[Plusea] has come up with an entertaining interface for an ohmmeter, which instead of displaying the resistance on an LCD or a meter shows it as the colours …read more

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With the radio control hobby arguably larger now than it ever has been in the past, there’s a growing demand for high-fidelity PC simulators. Whether you want to be able to “fly” when it’s raining out or you just want to practice your moves before taking that expensive quadcopter up for real, a good simulator on your computer is the next best thing. But the simulator won’t do you much good if it doesn’t feel the same; you really need to hook your normal RC transmitter up to the computer for the best experience.

[Patricio] writes in to share with …read more

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What makes a game a game? Like, how do we know that we’re looking at a variation of PONG when confronted with one? And how do we know how to play it? [Bertho] sought to answer this question as he designed what is probably the smallest-ever 1-D PONG game. His answer involves charlieplexing LEDs, using a voltage divider to save I/O pins, and a couple of AAAs that should last for a long, long time.

[Bertho]’s Minimum 1-D PONG, or m1dp for short, puts an ATTiny85 through its paces as gameplay quickly progresses from ‘I got this’ to ‘no one …read more

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The ATtiny85 is an incredible piece of engineering. In just eight pins, you get a microcontroller with just enough oomph to do some really heavy lifting. You get an Open Source toolchain, and if you’re really good, you can build your own programmer. It does have its limits though; there isn’t a whole lot of Flash, and of course you’re always going to need a few extra pins.

For his Hackaday Prize entry, [danjovic] is pushing whatever limits are left with the ‘tiny85. He’s using it as a test pattern generator, pushing out pixels to any old TV. The entire …read more

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Everyone recognizes Tetris, even when it’s tiny Tetris played sideways on a business card. [Michael Teeuw] designed these PCBs and they sport small OLED screens to display contact info. The Tetris game is actually a hidden easter egg; a long press on one of the buttons starts it up.

It turns out that getting a playable Tetris onto the ATtiny85 microcontroller was a challenge. Drawing lines and shapes is easy with resources like TinyOLED or Adafruit’s SSD1306 library, but to draw those realtime graphics onto the 128×32 OLED using that method requires a buffer size that wouldn’t fit the ATtiny85’s …read more

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Hardware development often involves working with things that can’t be directly perceived, which is one reason good development tools are so important. In appreciation of this, [David Johnson-Davies] created the IR Remote Control Detective to simplify working with IR signals. While IR remote controls are commonplace, there are a number of different protocols and encoding methods in use across different brands. The IR Detective takes care of all of that with three main components, none of which are particularly expensive. To use the decoder, one simply points an IR remote at the unit and presses one of the buttons. The …read more

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It’s hard to quit smoking. Trust us, we know. Half the battle is wanting to quit in the first place. Once you do, the other half is mostly fighting with yourself until enough time goes by that food tastes better, and life looks longer.

[Danko] recently quit smoking. And because idle hands are Big Tobacco’s tools, he kept himself busy through those torturous first few days by building a piece of pocket-sized motivation. This little board’s main purpose is to help him root for himself by showing the time elapsed since his final cigarette, the number of cigarettes he has …read more

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Once upon a time, [hardwarecoder] acquired a Gen8 HP microserver that he began to toy around with. It started with ‘trying out’ some visualization before spiraling off the rails and fully setting up FreeBSD with ZFS as a QEMU-KVM virtual machine. While wondering what to do next, he happened to be lamenting how he couldn’t also fit his laptop on his desk, so he built himself a slick, motion-sensing KVM switch to solve his space problem.

At its heart, this device injects DCC code via the I2C pins on his monitors’ VGA cables to swap inputs while a relay ‘replugs’ …read more

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Here’s a Big Mouth Billy Bass with extra lip thanks to Alexa. If you’re not already familiar, Big Mouth Billy Bass is the shockingly popular singing animatronic fish designed to look like a trophy fish mounted to hang on your wall. In its stock condition, Billy uses a motion sensor to break into song whenever someone walks by. It’s limited to a few songs, unless you like to hack things — in which case it’s a bunch of usable parts wrapped in a humorous fish! Hackaday’s own [Bob Baddeley] combined the fish with an Amazon Echo Dot, connecting the two …read more

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Lazy eye (technically Amblyopia) is a sight disorder that affects about 3% of the population where one eye is stronger than the other. Historically, treatment is via an eyepatch or special drops, but research shows that it may be better not to cover up the strong eye for long periods. It suggests that occluding the eye for short periods using a liquid crystal panel can yield better results. To that end, [Raninn] decided to hack some LCD glasses meant for 3D TV viewing to make a low-cost lazy eye treatment device.

This is his second version of [Raninn’s] glasses. The …read more

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It’s that special time of year again where the smell of baking cookies fill the house and shopping mall parking lots are filled with idiots and very angry people. [Kevin] thought it would be a good idea to build an LED Christmas tree and ended up building a great looking tree that’s also very simple. [...]

Tags:  attannenbaum tree time kevin special-time christmas-tree parking-lots attiny hacks  

We’re very accustomed to seeing small media player builds, but [txyz]‘s ATtiny-powered audio player is one of the smallest and most feature-packed we’ve seen. The audio player is powered by the very small and very inexpensive ATtiny2313. The music is stored on an SD card – a maximum of 2GB of WAV files recorded in mono [...]

Tags:  wav player music audio-player wav-files music-player attiny hacks  

In an effort to be more relevant to children that just aren’t impressed with crayons and markers anymore, Crayola released the ColorStudio HD pen. Instead of ink, this pen is filled with electronics that communicate with a tablet to draw different colors in the Crayola ColorStudio app. [Rob Hemsley] had done some work with capacitive [...]

Tags:  colorstudio crayola pen rob-hemsley hd-pen hemsley different-colors attiny hacks  

[Monirul Pathan] decided to make the card as unique as this gift when getting ready for a birthday. He designed and built his own musical card with LED edge-lit acrylic to display the message. The electronic design seeks to keep things as flat as possible. The card-shaped acrylic panel has a void to fit the [...]

Tags:  edge-lit card birthday edge-lit-acrylic birthday-card electronic-design attiny hacks  

[Jenna] sent in a very cool bootloader she thought people might like. It’s called Micronucleus and it turns the lowly ATtiny 85 into a chip with a USB interface capable of being upgraded via a ‘viral’ uploader program. Micronucleus weighs in at just over 2 kB, making it one of the smallest USB-compatible bootloaders currently available. The [...]

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In the early days of broadcast radio, the most expensive radio sets were extremely impressive pieces of furniture. With beautifully crafted wooden cases polished to a high shine, these wireless receivers were the focal point of any family room. Some of the most expensive radio sets even included a visual indicator signaling the strength of the reception, [...]

Tags:  eye radio attiny wireless-receivers broadcast-radio impressive-pieces attiny hacks  

If you’re looking for a DIY amplifier project made with a minimum of parts, this is the build for you. [Rouslan] created a 70 watt class D amplifier using an ATtiny45 and just a few dollars worth of additional components. A class D amplifier simply switches transistors of MOSFETs on and off very rapidly. By passing the signal produced [...]

Tags:  amplifier watt attiny diy-amplifier class-d-amplifier watt-amp attiny hacks  

If you’re like a lot of people, most of the time your computer speakers are on without actually playing any music. This wastes a bit of power, and [Bogdan] thought he could create a circuit to cut down on that wasted electricity. The result is a very tiny auto-on circuit able fit inside a pair [...]

Tags:  circuit turning music bogdan pc-speakers computer-speakers bit-of-power attiny hacks  

We can’t count the number of projects we’ve seen on Hackaday with a USB port.  Unfortunately, most of these builds – from RepRap controllers to wireless data loggers – don’t use the full capabilities offered to them with USB. [Ben] came up with a very cool USB breakout board that allows you to explore the USB [...]

Tags:  board dev usb ben data-loggers dev-board hackaday attiny hacks  

The ATtiny10 – along with its younger siblings that go by the names ATtiny 4, 5, and 9 – are the smallest microcontrollers Atmel makes. With only 32 bytes of RAM and 1 kB of Flash, there’s still whole lot you can do with this tiny six-pin chip. [feynman17] figured out a way to program this [...]

Tags:  arduino Programming attiny younger-siblings pin-chip attiny hacks  

As if getting your ass handed to you while playing video games wasn’t annoying enough, [furrtek] decided that the best way to help improve his skills was by inflicting physical pain each time his on-screen character died. While perusing the Internet looking for something to break through the doldrums of the day, he came upon [...]

Tags:  video game genezap video-game-skills corporal-punishment playing-video-games attiny hacks  

As is common among some hackers, [Henry] re-purposed an ATX power supply unit to function as a bench power supply for testing circuits on a breadboard (much like this fancy example). However, safety mechanisms on some modern PC PSUs do not automatically reset after over-current protection has kicked in, which soon became annoying for [Henry]. In order to make [...]

Tags:  atx-power-supply safety-mechanisms fancy-example attiny hacks  

We’re happy to see Arduino enthusiasts championing the use of smaller hardware when the need for a full-blown ATmega-based board just isn’t there. [Chris] has been doing just that, using ATtiny85 chips in his projects. But he’s tired of hooking jumper wires to flash the sketches. He finally got around to etching this ATtiny85 programming [...]

Tags:  rig attiny sketch chris jumper-wires sketches arduino hacks  

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 [...]

Tags:  may mother attiny flashing-lights chocolates attiny13 holiday hacks  

In the world of your dreams, you can build an entire world, an entire universe, an entire society governed by your every whim. While lucid dreaming you are a god in your own mind, free to create or destroy at will. You can train yourself to recognize when you are dreaming, but sometimes a little technological help can [...]

Tags:  world anything help world-of-your-dreams lucid-dreaming entire-world attiny hacks  

Falling on the heels of some fabulous ’lets see what we can emulate on an AVR’ builds we’ve seen, [Dimitri] emulated an ARM Cortex-M0 on an 8-pin ATtiny85. The emulator is written entirely in AVR assembly. Unfortunately, the instruction set of ATtinys don’t have a multiply instruction, so that had to emulated in a separate piece of code. Even [...]

Tags:  ARM instruction avr dimitri cortex attiny hacks  

[Pete Mills] recently bought himself a motorcycle, and as people are known to do, they start trying to scare him with gruesome stories of cycling accidents once they hear about his purchase. While he tries to shrug them off as people simply not minding their own business, something must have resonated with him, because he [...]

Tags:  motorcycle lighting upgrade pete-mills motorcycle-lighting own-business accidents attiny hacks  

We may be showing our age here, but we have no idea what a ‘poke’ on Facebook actually means. Whether it’s the passive-aggressive manifestations of online stalkers or an extension of  the ‘like’ button, all we know is [Jasper] and [Bartholomäus] built a machine that translates virtual pokes into our analog world. The “Poking Machine” as [Jasper] and [Bart] [...]

Tags:  machine age poking jasper bart facebook analog-world stalkers attiny hacks  

[wejp] picked up an IKEA SPÖKA night light, but he wasn’t entirely impressed with its functionality. Pressing the top of the ghost’s head causes it to cycle through a few colors, and pressing it a second time locks it into displaying the current color until its tapped again. Inspired by this SPÖKA hack which used [...]

Tags:  spka night usb ikea second-time hack attiny hacks  

Like many businesses out there, [Joonas Pihlajamaa’s] employer requires him to change his password every few months. Instead of coming up with a complex, yet easy to remember password again and again, he built a small USB device to do the work for him. He dismantled an old USB memory stick, fitting it with an [...]

Tags:  password dongle usb usb-memory-stick usb-device attiny hacks  

[John De Cristofaro aka Johngineer] uses various ATmega microcontrollers in his electronics projects, but he finds himself reaching for an ATtiny2313 or ATtiny4313 more often than not. He got tired of having to wire up pin headers, capacitors, and the like each time he started a project, so he spent some time designing an easy [...]

Tags:  breadboard attiny time john-de-cristofaro de-cristofaro pin-headers electronics-projects attiny hacks  

As a senior in high school, [Owen] has been waiting to hear from the colleges he applied to for months now. Some of his applications wanted a mid-year report to see if he didn’t come down with senioritis. [Owen] realized these colleges allowed additional materials beyond a high school transcript, so he built a tiny [...]

Tags:  video college school owen high-school-transcript playing-video-games senioritis attiny hacks  

Function generators are a handy bench tool to have around, and while you can usually cobble something together that works, it is much more handy to grab a device when you need it. Thats where this function generator sent to us by [Mohonri]comes in. Based around a ATTiny25 and a rail to rail op amp [...]

Tags:  generator function attiny function-generators function-generator wave-function attiny hacks  

[Quinn Dunki] got some free stuff from Element14 to evaluate, including this Mircrochip WiFi module. It’s been used as the centerpiece of an Arduino shield in the past, and she grabbed a copy of that library to see if it would play nicely with an ATtiny chip. What follows is a struggle to de-Arduino the [...]

Tags:  arduino attiny wifi quinn-dunki microcontrollers centerpiece microcontrollers  

When the Regency TR-1 transistor radio came out onto the market in the 1950s, it was hailed as a modern marvel of microelectronics. With only four transistors and a handful of other components, the TR-1 was a wonder of modern engineering. [Sprite_tm] may have those old-timers beat, though. He built an FM transmitter with the lowest [...]

Tags:  sprite regency transmitter regency-tr transistor-radio modern-engineering attiny hacks  

Behold this ATtiny85 based EEPROM programmer. It seems like a roundabout way of doing things, but [Quinn Dunki] wanted to build to her specifications using tools she had on hand. What she came up with is an ATtinyISP USB programmer, pushing data to an ATtiny85, which then programs an EEPROM chip with said data. The [...]

Tags:  programmer eeprom attiny quinn-dunki eeprom-programmer roundabout-way microcontrollers  

[Chris] has been hard at work building his own version of Simon called [Nomis]. Although [HAD] has featured an ATiny Simon clone before, the article does an excellent job explaining how the system works. The ATTiny85 is used to control this game, which, for now is laid out on a simple breadboard. A PCB version [...]

Tags:  version little nomis chris simon-clone simon pcb-version little-simon breadboard attiny hacks  

Since it’s the holidays and pine trees are being cut down and installed in living rooms all around the world, [Jarv] though it would be a good idea to make a musical Christmas ornament. He needed to keep some of his geek cred, so [Jarv] decided to build a musical [Blinky] ghost from Pacman. A [...]

Tags:  blinky jarv candy christmas-ornament pine-trees geek attiny hacks  

We’re all familiar with those musical greeting cards. Give the Hallmark store $10, and you have a card with a microcontroller inside that plays one of several songs available. [Jarv] was playing around with translating MIDI tracks to square wave songs with an Arduino earlier, so he decided to see how cheaply he could reproduce [...]

Tags:  card hallmark greeting musical-greeting-card musical-greeting-cards hallmark-store attiny hacks  

[Phil’s] parents grow their own organic food, but the harsh Ukraine winters make storing it a difficult proposition. Since it can drop to -30°C on occasion, they asked him to find a way to keep their storeroom at around 5-7°C above zero. He decided to construct his own programmable thermostat to keep things in check, [...]

Tags:  winter diy thermostat phil ukraine programmable-thermostat harsh-winter winter-cold attiny hacks  

[Larsim] worked out the timing necessary to read button and joystick data from an N64 controller using an ATtiny85 microcontroller. The project was spawned when he found this pair of controllers in the dumpster. We often intercept great stuff bound for the landfill, especially on Hippie Christmas when all the student switch apartments at the [...]

Tags:  controller attiny input n64-controller dumpster great-stuff microcontrollers  

It seems that [pppd] is always rushing out of his apartment to catch the bus, and he finds himself frequently questioning whether or not he remembered to lock the door. He often doubles back to check, and while he has never actually forgotten to lock the door, he would rather not deal with the worry. [...]

Tags:  circuit door simple pppd apartment worry attiny hacks  

[Steve] has an older third generation VW Golf, and as those who have owned one surely know, the beloved VR6 engine is wonderful but finicky. He says that the VR6 is particularly picky when it comes to oil temperature, so his daily routine involves hitting the MFA switch five times upon starting his car to [...]

Tags:  multifunction hacking car steve vr6-engine oil-temperature daily-routine attiny hacks  

[Mike Shegedin] makes full use of an 8-pin microcontroller with this ATtiny13-based dice project. With a maximum of six I/O pins (that includes using the reset pin as I/O) he needed a couple of tricks in order to drive 14 LEDs and use a momentary push button for user input. We’re certainly familiar with the [...]

Tags:  use hacks attiny mike-shegedin pin-microcontroller reset-pin leds microcontrollers  

The folks over at blondihacks are gearing up for an event called “The 24 Hours Of LeMons” which is a form of low-budget endurance racing involving cheap cars, heroic repairs, wacky themes, and a lot of serious driving. The format of the race is pretty simple, the cars race around the track continuously for a [...]

Tags:  hacks race attiny 24-hours-of-lemons race-clock endurance-racing attiny  

Servo8bit is a library for AVR microcontrollers that allows you to drive servo motors without the need for a 16-bit timer. Obviously, this is quite useful for smaller chips that only have 8-bit timers and it is specifically targeted at the ATtiny45 and ATtiny85 microcontrollers. The library offers 256 steps of resolution, and can drive up to [...]

Tags:  library servo attiny servo-motors microcontrollers hacks microcontrollers  

When it comes to Halloween costumes, [Michael] doesn’t like buying expensive and poorly made bits of cloth and fabric that resembles [random Disney character]. Last year, his son decided to be a robot for Halloween and although gray spray paint and dryer vent hose make a very good costume, that only goes so far. The [...]

Tags:  attiny robot halloween michael dryer-vent-hose random-disney halloween-costumes attiny hacks  

Okay, you’ve got a six-pin microcontroller with 1k of program memory, 32 bytes of SRAM, and it can’t be programmed using an In-System-Programmer. Do you think you can use it to develop a game? [Wrtlprnft] managed to build a Simon Says game based on the diminutive device that has four buttons and four LEDs. Judging [...]

Tags:  game hacks attiny simon-says pin-microcontroller simon-says-game system-programmer microcontrollers  

After [trandi] got his hands on a cheap R/C helicopter he realized the difficulties in actually flying a remote control helicopter. Instead of giving up, he decided to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol and then build a decoder around an ATtiny that would send commands to another microcontroller using a serial connection. The remote’s communications protocol [...]

Tags:  attiny protocol helicopter remote-control-helicopter infrared-guidance communications-protocol attiny hacks  

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 [...]

Tags:  board attiny serialcouple kenneth analog-to-digital-converter development-platforms analog-to-digital attiny hacks  

[Tom] wanted to try his hand at high-speed photography and needed some equipment to get things rolling. Not wanting to spend a ton of money on a lighting rig or trigger mechanism, he decided to build his own. In a three part series on his blog, he details the construction and testing of his high-speed [...]

Tags:  photography rig lighting tom high-speed-photography lighting-rig hacks attiny  

[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, [...]

Tags:  led cube attiny tom 4x4x4-cube unique-design leds attiny hacks  

[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 [...]

Tags:  hacks attiny scale electronic-scale beehive bees attiny  

[TZ] has been using ATtiny microcontrollers to read and pass along data from his Harley Davidson motorcycle. The image you see above is using an ATtiny 4313 to read data from the J1850 bus. The J1850 protocol is an older standard which may not be available in newer vehicles. But if your vehicle has it, [...]

Tags:  motorcycle bus attiny harley-davidson j1850-protocol j1850-bus harley-davidson-motorcycle microcontrollers  

[Kirill] wrote in to share his ATtiny hack, a 4x4x LED cube. The 64 LED display is a great choice to fully utilize the hardware he chose. It’s multiplexed by level. Each of the four levels are wired with common cathodes, switched by a 2N3904 transistor. The anodes are driven by two 595 shift registers, [...]

Tags:  led cube attiny kirill 2n3904-transistor shift-registers 4x4x4 hacks  

[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, [...]

Tags:  probe temperature office dan avr-chip temperature-probe temperature-monitoring attiny hacks  

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 [...]

Tags:  circuit attiny roll discrete-components google tip-line attiny hacks  

[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 [...]

Tags:  vibrate hacks attiny john-thomson forgetfulness ringer attiny  

[Gadre] built his own ATtiny project without using any batteries. It’s an electronic Dice (or die if you’re being critical) which uses induction to charge a storage capacitor to act as the power source. The voltage generator is made from a tube of Perspex which houses a set of rare-earth magnets. At the enter of [...]

Tags:  gadre hacks attiny rare-earth-magnets storage-capacitor electronic-dice microcontrollers  

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 [...]

Tags:  arduino project attiny thatcher microcontrollers cores hacks  

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 [...]

Tags:  theme attiny time hacks processors attiny  

[Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space. The game runs on a small cellphone-type LCD screen. The helicopter remains [...]

Tags:  game attiny helicopter owen pin-dip-package helicopter-game programming-space microcontrollers  

[Scott] is a big fan of the Arduino platform, and he’s not afraid to admit it. It does all the things he needs, but now and again he would like to use something a bit smaller, without all the bells and whistles the Arduino has to offer. He contemplated using an ATtiny for smaller projects, [...]

Tags:  arduino Programming attiny scott bells-and-whistles hacks  

I went to the last monthly meeting of Sector 67, a hackerspace in Madison, WI. One of the things shown off was a color changing LED light bulb that Menards was clearing out for $1.99. Inside there’s two RGB LEDs controlled by an ATtiny13 and powered by an AC/DC buck converter. An ATtiny13 will run [...]

Tags:  led bulb attiny madison led-light-bulb buck-converter attiny13 HackIt  

[gpsKlaus] built this little FM radio (translated) based on the AR1010 IC. That chip is controlled via I2C by an ATtiny45 microcontroller. His tuning implementation relies on presetting 16 stations in the firmware and selecting them with the white potentiometer. The FM chip came on a breakout board from SparkFun. Not bad at around $15 [...]

Tags:  radio attiny chip fm-chip potentiometer fm-radio Wireless hacks