DIY ATTiny Programming Board and Purse/Bike Light

After I built my TV-B-Gone, I wanted to work on something a little bit more complicated. I visited the Adafruit Website to see if I could find a cool project, but I knew that I would ultimately be a little let down if I built another project that required nothing but the easiest instruction following. Now, this is not to say that the Digg button is not in my future, because it probably is, but I wanted more. I finally settled on 4 different LED based projects that I found on Instructables. I'm not going to say what all of the projects are, I hope to do short write ups of those in the future. The one that I decided to build this time is the Purse Light.

First, though, I needed to finish up a loose end from my prior project. If you recall, I built an AVR Programmer, but I needed a programming board. I found an article on EvilMadScientist.Com detailing the construction of a board using a ZIF socket to allow for super easy and super cool removal of the chip prior to programming it. ZIF stands for zero insertion force. If you have ever installed an AMD athlon chip, you will know what this is does. When you install the computer chip, the last step, prior to placing the heat sink on the chip, is to push down the lever to hold the chip in place. That's what I got for the ATTiny Chip. I picked one up on Ebay for about $4 and bought some circuit boards from Radio Shack.

Below you can see the finished product. My programmer is now awesomely connected to my brand spanking new programming board.


Here is a shot of the bottom of the board. Check out that awesome wiring! I was given a great tip for getting good and cheap wire. Just buy some Cat 5 cable. It works like a charm.


Now, let's get on to the project. The first step was to program the chip. Ultimately, this step is not going to be easy. I still need to learn about burning the fuses of these chips, and future projects are going to require a greater knowledge of programming and compiling programs so that I can flash the chip with a *.hex file. This time, however, I went with a project that I knew had a *.hex file ready to go. I put the chip in my new programming board, fired up AVRDude, and was soon finished. Gosh darn it, I feel like I am in The Matrix!!!!

Next was the hard part. Remember this: When I first envisioned this project, it used white leds. You will soon note that it ended up red leds.

But never mind that for now. This would be my first ever experience of building an entire project from nothing but a schematic (and a nicely detailed list of parts). I have never read a circuit diagram before, but it's honestly not that difficult...at this level.


I built the entire project, put the battery in, turned the switch, and waited...and waited...and waited, but nothing happened. Oh Bugger.

This would be my first experience of utter failure. I didn't know what to do. There were so many things that could have gone wrong. Was the chip messed up? Did I solder something wrong? Etc.

The first thing I did was randomly connect wires. I did discover that connecting the batter directly to parts of the chip fired up the leds. This told me that most of my wiring was correct. Something must be wrong with the power situation.

I then undid the chip and plugged it back into the computer. I know that some projects require that you burn the fuses of the processor. So I went to a site that tells you the settings to do this and ran the program. Then I re-flashed the chip with the program.

I plugged it back in, and turned it on, and nothing happened.

At this point, I had an awesome thing to go to, so I put the project on the back burner for real life.

Afterwords, I spoke with Jeremy on the phone and told him my plan to wire up an identical project on a breadboard. I had enough additional parts because I planned ahead for additional projects. But I didn't have anymore white LEDs. Fancy that. It was also lucky for me. I built the project and instead used red LEDs. It worked perfectly!!!!!! I tried wiring the original white LEDs into the breadboard, and they didn't work.

But I knew that they did work....so what's up? I still don't know. Like I said, there must be some sort of power issue that I don't understand.

Either way, I took the red leds and wired them into my perf board. And it worked. Here is what the underside of the board looks like:


And the top:

I don't really know what I am going to do with this, though Jeremy suggested that he could use a Bike Lamp. I like the sound of that.

Anyhow, here is a video of the darn thing in action:

Enjoy.