Attiny 85 is a small programmable microcontroller by Atmel. The Attiny 85 can be programmed using an arduino board. The first part of the workshop comprised of building the attiny programming shield to be used with the Arduino uno.

Introduction to the Attiny85 microcontroller by dusjagr 

 

Schematic for the shield. The Shield used pins 7-13 and +5V – ground of of the arduino.

 

Soldering the shield

 

Completed shield to fit on the uno.

The next part of the workshop focused on using the attiny through simple programs.

To use the attiny, the first step was to install attiny support for arduino softeware.

The installation files can be found here – http://highlowtech.org/?p=1695 and here – https://github.com/damellis/attiny/archive/master.zip

After copying the files in the folder, the software should give the option of Attiny 85/45/etc under boards.

After installing the support for attiny, the next step is to program the arduino uno to be used as an isp programmer.

Once this programme is uploaded, with the shield in place, the attiny 85 can be programmed.

 

Dusjagr’s guide with sample codes can be found here – https://github.com/dusjagr/arttiny85-BLR

 

Simple blink and fade program.

 

5 LED persistence of vision (POV)  programmed with the attiny 85

http://www.instructables.com/id/ATtiny8545-POV-Display/?ALLSTEPS

Other interesting attiny 85 project resources online

https://hackaday.io/projects/tag/attiny

http://dangerousprototypes.com/tag/attiny/

http://www.instructables.com/id/ATtiny854525-LED-dice-Super-simple-and-CHEAP/

http://www.instructables.com/howto/attiny85/