Friday Fun: Being a complete Hidiot!
All it took was to tidy my desk...
Back in December 2017 RawHex sent me a Hidiot kit, as they knew of my love for the ATtiny85. (Sorry about the delay RawHex...)
All three of these boards use an ATtiny85. From L - R Digistamp, Adafruit Gemma, Generic ATtiny85 clone from Aliexpress.
Let's take a look at the kit!
In the tin we have this glorious array of components, and a lovely circuit board! So for half an hour today I sat down with a coffee and my trusty USB soldering iron, and built this kit, following the fantastic instructions on the Hidiot website Honestly these instructions provide the basics of building the board, then how to control the board using the Arduino IDE. But for me the take away feature is that RawHex takes the time to explain what the components do, and why they are used. All in a simple and concise manner! Bravo!
After forty minutes (come on I had to take some pics for you!) I had this!
So let's plug it in and check that it works!
Then lets setup our Arduino IDE to use the board. (I'd already done this as I have a few ATtiny85 projects)
Now we need to flash an LED, obviously! :) This example script is from RawHex's Github Tutorials page.
// setup runs once on boot:
void setup() {
// Tell the ATTiny that we want to use pin 1 as an output
pinMode(1, OUTPUT); // Our LED is pin 1 and we're supplying electricity to it.
}
// loop runs forever and ever:
void loop() {
digitalWrite(1, HIGH); // Make the LED turn on
delay(10); // wait 1 second
digitalWrite(1, LOW ); // Make the LED turn off
delay(100); // wait 1 second
}
Now we have an ultra fast blinky!
So why should I get one of these?
- Great kit to solder.
- Control WS2811 Neopixels really easily, and reliably.
- Supporting Open Source hardware.
- Supporting the work necessary to design, test and build these kits.
- Support great documentation, without it we cannot learn!
- Great prototyping area.
- Can be used to programme an ATtiny85 and test before deploying to a smaller project.
- ATtiny85 is a cost effective alternative to the Arduino.
Where can I get a kit?
Head over to RawHex's website and pick one up!