The video says they're a custom board, but I'm hoping someone knows of a place to buy such a thing..
All I want it to do is control an LED strip....
lil_satan's picture:
It's annoying that they said the PCB is "open source" at the start of the video but didn't provide a link to design files, even after being asked in the comments. oshpark (the company that manufactured the PCB for them) does have a way you can share your PCB design, which anyone else can order:
https://oshpark.com/shared_projects
but there are hundreds of shared projects so that would make it difficult to find theirs without a link, especially since we can't be sure they even did bother to share their design (it's an optional feature).
The only thing special at all about that board is that it's fairly compact. If that's not a required feature for your application you can find many other ATtiny breakout boards that will work just as well, if not better. Here's a very reasonably priced ATtiny board sold by the person who administrates the ATtiny Arduino hardware package you will likely be using to program your board:
Thats great! Thanks for the quick response.
I'm just looking for a board that is the same width as the led strip, 10mm. Should make for a little cleaner installation..
Thanks again!
Here's a similar one that does provide all the design files that you can just send off to a PCB manufacturer:
It has a header for I2C communication with an external controller device (Raspberry Pi in their project) but you don't necessarily need to use that header. You can just program the ATtiny with a standalone program. They even have a picture where they cut off the I2C section of the board to make it more compact for that usage.
It should be pretty easy to design your own board like the one on the youtube video. Oshpark is a good option when you want a few copies of small board like this and it's pretty fast and beginner friendly. If you want a lot of these boards there are other services that are a better deal like DirtyPCBs:
http://dirtypcbs.com/store/pcbs
Genius!
Thanks! I've been looking through OSHPark's shared boards looking for the one I want... Maybe I should try my hand at designing my own..
B
Found 'em!
Good work! It's a shame there isn't better organization of those shared projects. I'm sure there are some amazing designs hidden among the ~15000 shared on that site but tricky to find what you're looking for. I guess if people made a better effort with their descriptions it would help to find them in the search.
I see someone commented on the video with a link to the design so that should make it easy for others looking for it in the future. It's a shame the creator of the video didn't bother to do that from the start. Without the link, it's more of a "look what I did" video rather than a tutorial that helps others to reproduce the work or build upon it.
I think these are pure genius! They're thin enough that you could hide them in the same space that the led strip is in...
I'm going to try to design one, a little differently.. I think it would be good to have only 1 set of power connectors, a resistor on the board for ws2812, and make it so the programming bits could be cut off to save a few mm in length..
Any other thoughts?
If you put a line of unplated drill holes between the ICSP header and the rest of the board, with just enough space between the drills for the traces, you could probably just break the header part off.
It would be cool to have a jig you could press down over the top of the ATtiny with pogo pins to make the programming connections so you don't need the ICSP header at all but I'm not sure whether that exists or could easily be made. I know I've seen one for the TQFP-32.
There is also a standardized miniature ISP header footprint called Tag-Connect that's pretty nice. You do need to buy the ~$34 cable though.
a jig you could press down over the top of the ATtiny with pogo pins to make the programming connections
They exist (and also "test clips"), but ... sticker shock.
It looks like the pins on this are staggered slightly (a sparkfun invention, I think), which is supposed to make "reasonable" contact with inserted header pins without soldering (especially if you only need to program it a couple of times.)