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Adafruit's Trinket

learn.adafruit.com

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Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#31

Post by ChuckMcM »

tynan wrote: post #30

For someone who knows nothing much about Arduinos, what are a few examples of projects this would be good for?

Well the interesting things probably involve using the SPI port to talk to some memory expansion.

At Google, Henner Zeller built a circuit pretty much like this that drove an RGB LED and was used for Test status 'orbs'. Basically with a bit of code your orb would turn red if your tests started failing in the continuous build.

I used one to add a foot 'key' to my setup when playing World of Warcraft (it was my push to talk switch) but it could have been anything, it pretended to be a USB keyboard with one key :-).

I've seen them used to pretend to be a mouse and move the mouse around (a 'jiggler') so that a machine wouldn't kick in the screen saver.

All various sorts of things you might want to do with a bit of compute.

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#32

Post by Cyranix »

tynan wrote: post #30

For someone who knows nothing much about Arduinos, what are a few examples of projects this would be good for?

Head over to http://hackaday.com or http://makezine.com and search for Arduino or ATMega or microcontroller -- you should have a ton of hits describing various projects.

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#33

Post by notgoodrobot »

Cyranix wrote: post #32
tynan wrote: post #30

For someone who knows nothing much about Arduinos, what are a few examples of projects this would be good for?

Head over to http://hackaday.com or http://makezine.com and search for Arduino or ATMega or microcontroller -- you should have a ton of hits describing various projects.

How similar is this to an Arduino?

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#35

Post by zxcvgm »

The ATtiny series do not have USB capability, which is why they are cheaper. The underlying bitbang implementation comes from V-USB [1], which is commonly used to add USB capability in software. Another implementation which may be of interest is LUFA [2].

[1] http://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/index.html [2] http://www.fourwalledcubicle.com/LUFA.php

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#36

Post by Kliment »

IgorPartola wrote: post #14
phunge wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with the launchpad has been mixed. The chips are definitely aimed at the low power, low requirements side of things; I had a project where the MSP430g2231's inability to clock from an external high-frequency crystal was a dealbreaker. There's also a wider breadth of hobbyist software targeting the AVR. If you're a hobbyist, it's definitely not worth saving a few bucks if you're only making a few of them…

I was under the impression that the newer chips are able to clock from an external crystal. My 2553 certainly came with one, though I have had no need to use it yet.

That's the crystal for the slow clock, which runs at about 32kHz. You still can't clock the main clock off it.

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#37

Post by Kliment »

notgoodrobot wrote: post #33
Cyranix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Head over to http://hackaday.com or http://makezine.com and search for Arduino or ATMega or microcontroller -- you should have a ton of hits describing various projects.

How similar is this to an Arduino?

Runs same code, has less memory, storage, and I/O

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#38

Post by retSava »

phunge wrote: post #10
IgorPartola wrote: post #4

Or for $10, you could get the TI MSP430 LaunchPad [1]. You can then pop off the DIP chip and mount it however you want. It is nice since the chips themselves are about $1 or so each (depending on which one you get). [1] http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/msp430_head.html

My experience with the launchpad has been mixed. The chips are definitely aimed at the low power, low requirements side of things; I had a project where the MSP430g2231's inability to clock from an external high-frequency crystal was a dealbreaker. There's also a wider breadth of hobbyist software targeting the AVR. If you're a hobbyist, it's definitely not worth saving a few bucks if you're only making a few of them…

While it can't use an external xtal, it still has an internal crystal oscillator which can clock it at some MHz, up 16 MHz I think. It's not as accurate but cheaper and more flexible. I did a port of the Contiki OS to the Launchpad, which now comes with the msp430g2452 (16kB flash/256 B RAM) and the 'g2553 (16/512). At home I have them using cc2500-radios (2$ modules from aliexpress) and a radio duty cycling protocol I wrote, with plenty of flash space left for user applications.

You can find the port at https://github.com/msloth/contiki-launchpad and a write-up at http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/contiki-for-ti-msp4... and http://www.bithappens.se/blog/2013/05/26/simple-yet-efficien... with lots of measurements and other crowd pleasers.

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#39

Post by makomk »

notgoodrobot wrote: post #33
Cyranix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Head over to http://hackaday.com or http://makezine.com and search for Arduino or ATMega or microcontroller -- you should have a ton of hits describing various projects.

How similar is this to an Arduino?

Probably not very. The Arduino uses hardware serial and a USB-to-serial chip to communicate with the PC, whereas this has no hardware serial or USB-to-serial at all and is missing various peripherals.

Re: Adafruit's Trinket

#40

Post by exDM69 »

tynan wrote: post #30

For someone who knows nothing much about Arduinos, what are a few examples of projects this would be good for?

Compared to an Arduino, this is smaller, consumes less power and has a "standard" layout and costs about 1/3rd of an "official" Arduino. The downsides are that there's less memory and less cpu perf, there are less I/O pins, but a lot of (practical, non-beginner) projects don't need that many pins. A highlight would be hardware SPI and I2C support, which are communication protocols for small gadgets (the AVR chip in Arduino has I2C/SPI but you can't use it from Arduino code, you need to write C) and PWM (pulse width modulation) which is a pseudo-analog output signal used to control things like servos.

So what could it be used for? Get a bunch of sensors and actuators that communicate with SPI/I2C/PWM. Think about things like accelerometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, liquid crystal displays, motor controllers, servo motors. Now plug them together and build just about any gadget you can imagine.

It's better than an Arduino if you're short on space, weight or power consumption. Things like tiny flying machines or wearable gadgets.

If you're a beginner looking for your first microcontroller platform, the Arduino will probably be easier to approach.

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