TinyPhoto is a small rotating photobook embedded graphics project that uses the low-power ATtiny85 microcontroller (3mA) and a 128×64 pixel OLED display (c.5-10mA typical, 15mA max). This combination can deliver at least 20 hrs of continuous play on a 3V coin cell battery (225mAh capacity). TinyPhoto can be readily built from a handful of through-hole electronic components (12 parts, £5) organized to fit onto a 3cm x 7cm single-sided prototype PCB. The embedded software is c.150 lines of C code and uses less than 1,300 bytes of on-chip memory. TinyPhoto rotates through five user-selectable images using a total of 4,900 bytes (yes, bytes!) stored in the on-chip flash RAM. The setup produces crisp photos on the OLED display with a real-time display rate that is instantaneous to the human eye with the Tiny85 boosted to run at 8MHz. A custom device driver (200 bytes) sets up the OLED screen and enables pixel-by-pixel display. Custom Forth code converts a 0-1 color depth image into a byte-stream that can be written to the onboard flash for rapid display. It is a reminder of what can be accomplished with low-fat computing…
The magic, of course, is in the software. This article describes how this was done, and the software that enables it. Checkout the TinyPhoto review on Hackaday!
Tiny Photo – 3cm x 7cm photo viewer powered by ATTiny85 8-bit microcontroller sending pixel level image data to OLED display (128×64 pixels), powered by 3V coin cell battery. Cycles through 5 images stored in 5kB of on-chip Flash RAM. (Note, this is 1 million times less memory than on a Windows PC with 8GB RAM). The magic is in the software.
This article explains how to use the Arduino toolchain to program microcontrollers from the Arduino IDE using their bootloaders, and also burning bootloaders directly onto bare microcontroller chips. It covers developing interactively with Forth (rapid prototyping), and moving your creations from a development board (Nano, Uno) to a standalone, low-cost, low-power, small footprint chip such as the ATMega328P or ATTiny85 or ATTiny84. Each of these microcontrollers is powerful, inexpensive, and allows using 3V batteries directly without the need to boost voltage to 5V. Additionally, we describe how to build an inexpensive (under £5), standalone 3-chip Atmel AVR universal bootloading programmer that you can use to program all of the chips above. Continue reading this article…
Rapid prototyping can be an accelerator for hardware or embedded solutions. But for a successful outcome, follow the recommended checklist / task sequence given below, as all of these steps will likely need to be touched upon at some point in the process. Continue reading this article…
For under £10, you can put together a microcontroller development platform, ready to program directly from your PC over USB using free Arduino software. Once programmed, your microcontroller will run autonomously, untethered from your PC, powered by as small a battery power supply as a single 1.5V AAA or 3V CR2032 coin cell. You can have it interact with its environment using dozens of low-cost sensors and motors. Everything you need to explore the exciting world of embedded systems is available to you, typically for less than a day pass on the London underground.
A homebrew Arduino Nano microcontroller development kit for under £12 (including optional OLED display)
Building a fully analog electronic piano using only resistors, capacitors, and transistors, is an insightful experiment in electronic sound generation from first principles. I designed and built a 13-key analog piano in early 2019 using discrete through-hole components on a breadboard powered off a 9V DC battery. The design creates 13 astable multivibrator oscillator circuits, each able to be tuned to a given note frequency in the C5 to C6 range. The outputs of the oscillators are collected (mixed) to create a polyphonic analog audio signal that is amplified and run through an 8-ohm speaker. The device fits into an 11x25cm footprint. Check out how it sounds! (To hear the explanation of how it works, start at the beginning.)
Electronics is a gateway subject to modern technology, along with computer programming and applied mathematics. Getting started in electronics is easier than one may imagine and not prohibitively expensive. With the right approach, exploring electronics can begin for children as early as 3 years old. I’ve been play-testing these ideas with my children, Adam (3 yrs & 4 months) and Jasmine (6 yrs & 10 months), and a couple of teenagers (13 and 14 yrs). Read on for the journey plan, and a photo gallery of what we’ve built so far.
Adam having wired his first circuit and seeing his selected blue LED lit!
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