ATtiny85duino - Tiny85 development board

Last month I designed my first custom PCBs using a program called "Fritzing" and ordered a small batch of them from an online service. You can order really small quantities, I ordered six each of Tiny84 development board, Tiny85 development board and a bunch of tiny boards to put into some Tiny85-based gadgets I've got planned.

The boards arrived last week...

I just got all the parts together to build up one of the Tiny85 development boards, so here it is: The Tiny85duino!

I built the first board in no time. You don't realize how much time you spend cutting up bits of wire, stripping them, tinning them and soldering them until you don't have to do it any more.

It all worked perfectly, here it is blinking its very first LED.

While I was building it I spotted a couple of ways I could improve it, mostly through better labeling of the parts. The labels didn't come out very well because I had to use a very small font to get the text on the board (the PCB is tiny - only 26x17mm, 1 inch x 5/8ths of an inch). I also realized the most logical way to use the device on the table was upside down to the way I designed it.

I don't think I'd change much apart from the labeling though. I had no problems fitting the components apart from the ceramic capacitor which had its legs too far apart (I had to straighten them to get it to fit - no big deal).

Very cool. What service did you use?

OSH Park. I liked the purple/gold combination (although in real life it's not as purple as I hoped it would be...)

To make it more purple, put a copper pour / ground plane on it. The copper reflects the light through the purple making it much more striking.

The FR4 substrate is a slightly yellow color, which dulls the purple.

The Tiny85duino

How cool is that? How can I get a couple of blank PCBs?
Now that my 'Bobuino' 644P/1284P board is running I need a new target chip to play with.

Lefty

Should sell them on Tindie, I bet they'd be popular. :slight_smile: I love the ATTiny chips, so versatile, and CHEAP. :slight_smile:

I guess I could spare a couple of boards. The price would be $3 each plus postage.

If anybody's interested, send me a PM...

Awesome!
An really cool project!

Just to show off my ATtiny85 board I got from fungus in the mail yesterday. Got it blinking today!

Using a USBtiny programmer and used the hardware files from:

http://code.google.com/p/arduino-tiny/

Everything worked first shot, no problems uploading the blink program. More testing to follow, but to be
honest it was almost too easy to be a challenge. :smiley:

Lefty

ATtiny85.JPG

retrolefty:
Everything worked first shot, no problems uploading the blink program. More testing to follow, but to be
honest it was almost too easy to be a challenge. :smiley:

Happy to help!

Would you be willing to share your files so I can make my own boards?

very cool indeed!

phantomtypist:
Would you be willing to share your files so I can make my own boards?

I think I'm going to keep control of them for the moment.

(it's not exactly a difficult circuit to reproduce though...)

dtokez:
very cool indeed!

Thanks!

fungus:

phantomtypist:
Would you be willing to share your files so I can make my own boards?

I think I'm going to keep control of them for the moment.

(it's not exactly a difficult circuit to reproduce though...)

Ok. I just didn't want to waste time reinventing the wheel. I'm not an expert at Eagle so it takes me longer to crank something out. Thanks for the inspiration though.

If you have the money and inclination, consider doing this with surface mount parts. Atmel has parts with really reasonable pitches and 0805 caps and resistors are not at all hard to solder on either. Here is my first surface mount project, quite recent:

I am not sure if you would save a whole lot of space on that board, but on many you save a bunch of space.

phantomtypist:
Ok. I just didn't want to waste time reinventing the wheel. I'm not an expert at Eagle so it takes me longer to crank something out. Thanks for the inspiration though.

You could view it as an experiment for learning Eagle (that's the reason I did it except I used Fritzing, not Eagle). :slight_smile:

If you want predesigned boards there's plenty on the web, just google "attiny85 pcb" or similar. eg: http://tinkerlog.com/howto/tiny25-header/

Or use perfboard. My first dev system was done that way and works perfectly: http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,134673.0.html