Several friends recently planned a party for maker, e-textiler and all-around awesome person Liza Stark — and I wanted to celebrate her with blinkies appropriate for the occasion.
The event was to take place in a rented house with a porch overlooking a slice of woods.
I decided to fill the trees with digital fireflies.
The short story: This week I made a blinky-buzzy toy to occupy our cat with a random sequence of teases. And he loved it!
The longer story starts just over a year ago, when Team Blinky friend Liza Stark gave me an 8-legged computer chip the size of a peanut and said, with wide eyes, “You can do amazing things with these!”
So for #MakeEveryWeek No. 3, I learned how to play with this minuscule computer.
The little chip was an ATtiny (pronounced like an author, A. T. Tiny), which is essentially a super-simple Arduino.
Its legs correspond to a some of the familiar Arduino pins: power, ground and five input-output points. More details are on the Sparkfun site.
Just like an Ardunio, you can code it to light LEDs, read simple sensors and buzz buzzers. You program it using Arduino desktop software and the Arduino language. You even use an Arduino as a kind of “mother ship” to load programs into the ATtiny — because it's missing all of the connectors Arduino boards have.