Arduino IDE and Attiny13, doable?

So my uncle is putting together a kit to run some high power LED lights on his motorcycle and the kit uses an attiny13, he'd like to reprogram it to match exactly what he wants.
He doesn't have a ton of C knowledge and hasn't used a microcontroller before.

I'm curious if a hex file can be built with the arduino IDE and then stuffed into the attiny13 using either an arduinoISP or ladyada's isp programmer.
Mainly what I want is the much nicer and simpler arduino IDE. Looking at the AVR C code gave me a headache.

It can be done.

There are two parts to the Arduino software: the IDE and the libraries. The IDE can be configured to work with any AVR processor. The libraries are really designed to work with a processor that has more Flash and SRAM than the ATtiny13.

There are folks who have mated Arduino to ATtiny13 and written to tell the tale...
http://accrochages.drone.ws/en/node/38
http://www.google.com/search?q=attiny13+arduino

If your uncle (or you) really wants to use the Arduino libraries he is far better off replacing the ATtiny13 with a "bigger" processor. The ATtiny85 (and "up") is a good choice.

If your uncle (or you) doesn't mind directly manipulating registers then the ATtiny13 with the Arduino IDE are a good choice.

Awesome, thanks.
I'll pitch the attiny85 to him. It has hardware PWM as well, which the 13 appears to lack.

It has hardware PWM as well

On three pins.

which the 13 appears to lack

According to the datasheet, the ATtiny13 has PWM on two pins: PB0 and PB1.

Strange, I can't find anybody using them. All the examples I've found do the pwm in software.

I have used both PWM pins but, on the ATTiny13, I'm using assembler.
ATTiny45's are another option too -- no bootloader but using the Arduino
as an ISP has worked well for me.

-Rusty-

Strange, I can't find anybody using them. All the examples I've found do the pwm in software.

Probably because the '13 has just one timer. I suspect the one timer is used to ... keep time. :wink:

Who would want to do that? :stuck_out_tongue: