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Small Glowing Thing

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Hacking Electronics Planet FSFE
This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

Quite a while ago I obtained an Adafruit NeoPixel Stick. It was cheap enough to be an impulse buy but it took me some time to get around to actually doing something with it.

I’ve been wanting to play a little more with the ATtiny range of microcontrollers so these things seemed to go together nicely. It turns out that getting an ATtiny programmed is actually rather simple using an Arduino as an ISP programmer. I’ve written up some notes on the procedure at the 57North Hacklab wiki.

The thing that caught me out is that while you don’t actually need to burn a bootloader to the ATtiny, you do still need to select that option from the menu, as this sets the soft fuses to determine the speed it will run at. For a good hour I was wondering why all my Neopixels were just white and not changing and it was because the ATtiny was still running at its default 1MHz.

The Neopixels in action commanded by the ATtiny85

The Neopixels in action commanded by the ATtiny85

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