DICE10 – electronic dice controlled by two GPIO.

Yay,  another mini-project with the ATtiny10!

A while ago I devised a scheme to drive an electronic dice with only two IO lines. I finally found the time and motivation to build up a small design using this as an entry for the hackaday 1k compo. Please find project details on the hackaday.io page or the github repository.

How many I/Os are needed to drive electronic dice?

I recently bought a very low cost electronic dice kit on an impulse. Assembling it was good retro-fun for a while. The circuit design is was purely 70ies style: A CD4017, a NE555 and a couple of transistors. Of course, this got me thinking: How would it be done today in a most efficient way? Of course this means using a microcontroller, and, of course this means using as few resources as possible. Will an ATiny10 with 3 I/Os pins do?

The Nanite 85

Possibly the smallestest ATtiny85 based ‘duino derivative.

Recently, Olimex anncounced the Olimexino 85s, claimed to be the “World’s smallest Arduino ever“. Now, that looks like a challenge. I guess it is about time to show off what has been on my desk since some time last year: The Nanite, pictured below.

µ-Wire – USB on an ATtiny 10

Atmels AVR ATtiny10 are surprisingly powerful devices that come in an extremely tiny SOT23 package with only 6 pins. The have 1kb of flash, 32 bytes of SRAM and use the reduced AVR core which only supports 16 instead of 32 register. It seems like Atmels idea of these devices is to use them as an advanced blinker, and to replace tiny logic circuits. But other people have shown that much more is possible. For example the noiseplug (video), a chiptune player, and a Simon Says game.

I previously used the ATtiny10 in the TinyTouchbutton, a touchbutton controlled light with WS2812 LEDs. This time I aimed higher: Is it possible to turn the ATtiny10 into a USB compatible device? My goal was to implement a subset of the little-wire functionality to control a WS2812 LED by USB. This takes 3 I/O lines, which is exactly the number of free pins on the ATtiny10.

Littlewire supports several functions to control WS2812 LEDs on arbitrary I/O ports. I simplified this to only supporting a single LED on a specific pin, however still retained protocol compatibility. This means that all the little-wire host-programs still work. The finished device can, for example, be used as an RGB indicator LED similar to the Blink(1).

My test setup is shown below. The ATtiny10 is almost the smallest part of the circuit. There are some discrete components on the rear-side of all PCBs, so do not be surprised about missing decoupling capacitors, zener diodes and resistors.

Interrupt free V-USB

Starting with V2.0, Micronucleus is going to use an interrupt free modification of the software USB implementation V-USB. This provides significant benefits for the bootloader, as it is not necessary anymore to patch the interrupt vector of the user program. A surprising side effect was a speed up of the V-USB data transmission,  which may also be helpful in other applications. Here, I try to give a rough overview about the meandering work that led to this achievement.

Previous versions of Micronucleus (and also the Trinket bootloader) use an ingenious mechanism devised by Louis of embedded creations to patch the interrupt vector transparently to the user program. Although this approach works very well, it still adds a lot of complexity to the bootloader, will add a couple of cycles of interrupt delay, and carries the risk of breaking the user program in a few rare cases. Removing this burden allows for a drastic reduction in code size and improved robustness.

New member of the WS2812 family

There is a new addition to the popular WS2812 family of RGB LEDs with integrated controller: A 8mm through hole version. Right now they seem to be in pilot production stage. The only place that has them is Soldering Sunday where they are called PixelBits. My understanding is that they will also be available at the usual sources later this year. I got a couple of them to test for compatibility with my light_ws2812 library.

What’s pretty cool about these LEDs is that they are diffuse – no more blinding unidirectional light. This might be very useful for indicator lights. Furthermore, you can easily wire them freeform without a pcb. I see a lot of RGB LED cubes coming up…

Light_WS2812 library V2.0 – Part II: The Code

After investigating the timing of the WS2812 protocol in the previous part, the question is now how to use this knowledge for an optimized software implementation of a controller. An obvious approach would be to use an inner loop that uses a switch statement to branch into separate functions to emit either a “0” symbol or a “1” symbol. But as it is often, there is another solution that is both more elegant and more simple.