iCufflinks on ATTiny85
After playing with Arduino for a while I decided to go hardcore and experiment with bare ATTiny microprocessors. I ordered a couple of ATTiny85, ATMega328, and a AVRISP mkII programmer. I started with a simpler ATTiny85, a breadboard, couple of resistors, and power supply. What better project to start with as a blinking LED? But blinking is boring. I wanted pulsating. iCufflinks pulsating.
iCufflinks are cufflinks that pulsate to mimmic Apple laptop’s LED sleeping light pattern made by Adafruit. The design and software are open source. iCufflinks are based on ATTiny10 microprocessor which is way simpler than ATTiny85 I have. So I ported the assembly code and made it work on a breadboard. I never read almost entire data sheet for a microprocessor, but without that I would not be able to make the port. I was surprised to see that the instruction sets of similar microprocessors can be so different.
Blog post on programming ATTiny85 from Yet Another Hacker’s Blog was very helpful on connecting the programmer to the chip.
I also used Atmel AVR Studio 5 running in VMWare Fusion to program the ATTiny.
My fork is in my Github.
Why did I do this? BlinkM is running on ATTiny85 