Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#2I have a strip of ATTINY85's at hand for misc electronic projects and they've been really great for beginner-level circuits and learning embedded programming. I'm a dev by trade but have a bit of electronics knowledge and these are cheap enough to not worry about frying them and still get the job done.
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#3Awesome work. I just dove into the world of AVR programming and bought a bunch of ATTINY85's. Super easy to work with, extremely versatile, and low power consumption.
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#4I assume the purpose of this would be to build a Dell compatible charger but this repo doesn't appear to provide much information on how to actually do that. I get that the microcontroller provides the signalling the laptop needs to identify the charger, but assuming you built this circuit, how would you actually use it to charge a laptop ?
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#5I assume the purpose of this would be to build a Dell compatible charger but this repo doesn't appear to provide much information on how to actually do that. I get that the microcontroller provides the signalling the laptop needs to identify the charger, but assuming you built this circuit, how would you actually use it to charge a laptop ?
I believe the old Dell chargers simply have a data pin, which I presume would carry the data generated by this project
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#6I assume the purpose of this would be to build a Dell compatible charger but this repo doesn't appear to provide much information on how to actually do that. I get that the microcontroller provides the signalling the laptop needs to identify the charger, but assuming you built this circuit, how would you actually use it to charge a laptop ?
It's a bit over my head, but the schematic in the readme seems to have a shared ground, with one pin going to the attiny microcontroller, and the other going to a generic power source. With a big warning that your power source needs to be up to spec.
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#7The ATtiny85 is nice, with 8kB flash, 512 bytes RAM & EEPROM, 5-6 GPIO pins, they are just enough to do something interesting. But I don't use the ATtiny85 as much as I want to, because flashing requires a separate programmer hardware. It's enough friction to get in the way of rapid software iteration. I once made the mistake of inserting the ATtiny85 upside down into the programmer, and it promptly cooked it dead. Lesson learned.
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#8Awesome work. I just dove into the world of AVR programming and bought a bunch of ATTINY85's. Super easy to work with, extremely versatile, and low power consumption.
Do you use a USB programmer, or did you buy ones that have a USB programmer built in?
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#9I have a strip of ATTINY85's at hand for misc electronic projects and they've been really great for beginner-level circuits and learning embedded programming. I'm a dev by trade but have a bit of electronics knowledge and these are cheap enough to not worry about frying them and still get the job done.
They're such a nice starting place for embedded dev! I'd messed around with Arduino things for a long time, and recently started messing with the chip itself without the abstraction. The ATTINY series is powerful enough for many things while having a relatively small and easy to work with footprint (from a physical and register standpoint). It's actually possible to go through the entire datasheet and understand it, then poke all the right registers. It's also satisfying to be able to plop it onto a breadboard!
I'm excited for the Rust + AVR world to move forward a bit so I can keep playing with it without the currently required hacks :)
Re: Emulator of Original Dell Charger Using ATTINY85
#10I assume the purpose of this would be to build a Dell compatible charger but this repo doesn't appear to provide much information on how to actually do that. I get that the microcontroller provides the signalling the laptop needs to identify the charger, but assuming you built this circuit, how would you actually use it to charge a laptop ?
It's a bit over my head, but the schematic in the readme seems to have a shared ground, with one pin going to the attiny microcontroller, and the other going to a generic power source. With a big warning that your power source needs to be up to spec.
If the connector on the left represents the output of a generic power supply then I still don't see how you would connect this on the laptop side.
EDIT: On further thought I think that connector must be intended to represent the laptop input and Vcc is the output of a generic power supply (with sufficient voltage and current capacity). It was not clear to me because my Dell laptop doesn't appear to have a 3-pin power connector so maybe this only applies to certain models.