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6Dec/090

Finally Got My FakeFire LED PCB Boards Done

ATTINY13A Fake Fire LEDA while back I wrote about a neat project that I had read about where a couple of LEDs and an ATTINY13 had been used to simulate the flicker flame of a candle or fire. I built a prototype and quickly realized that project deserved more of my attention, I spent the next couple of days tweaking the design and code to come up with this! My primary design focus was battery life and I've been running this board with 3 standard AA batteries for nearly 2 months. Good enough for me! This design incorporates a photocell to turn the LEDs off during light hours and a deep sleep mode for the AVR when the LEDs are not illuminated. A watchdog timer triggers the AVR to wake up and sample the photocell to decide if it's dark enough to start illuminating the LEDs. I've included the Eagle schematic and board files in addition the the AVR C code and high-res pictures in the attached zip.

ATTINY13A LED Fake Fire

ATTINY13A Fake Fire LED

Fake Fire PCB Zip File
Title: Fake Fire PCB (2023 clicks)
Caption: Fake Fire PCB Zip File
Filename: fakefirepcb.zip
Size: 3 MB

Fake Fire PCB Zip File
Title: Fake Fire PCB (2023 clicks)
Caption: Fake Fire PCB Zip File
Filename: fakefirepcb.zip
Size: 3 MB

12Sep/090

Using EEPROM Chips…

I've been spending time researching options for additional memory capacity for an embedded AVR project and found that there are many storage optionsUsing EEPROMs available. My problem is that I wanted to consume as few I/O pins as possible as my project was already using most of the pins on my AVR. This is when I decided I would try out a few of the 24LC256 chips from digikey.com. The great things about these chips is that you can put 8 of them on the same bus (2 pins from the AVR). I just wired up a quick demo using two of them and put together a sketch to read and write from both. You can check out more example code here on the Arduino playground. I've included a demo sketch, high-res pictures as well. I think Fritzing is going to add lots of value to the community as I'll be included schematics from thier software in future postings.

EEProm Example
Title: EEProm (1801 clicks)
Caption: EEProm Example
Filename: eeprom.zip
Size: 2 MB

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