Arduino that rocks at 50 cents
Not everyone needs a full-fledged microcontroller board like Arduino Uno or Raspberry Pi for their simple, humble projects. As of today, the cost of a bulky microcontroller board may cost you from $15 up to $100 depending on how rich you feel about yourself. But if you’re only building a small project where you may need just a few I/O pins, you don’t have to spend your entire coffee budget for a month on just a fat microcontroller board. Trust me. You can have this ultra-low-cost microcontroller for only about $0.50.
Burn the Bootloader
Arduino doesn’t support ATtiny13A chip out of the box. You need to install it through Additional Board Manager. Follow the instructions from: https://github.com/MCUdude/MicroCore#how-to-install
- After installing the new board, choose Tools > Board > MicroCore > ATtiny13
- Leave the default BOD at 2.7V.
- Leave the default Clock at 9.6 MHz internal osc.
- Keep Micros disabled.
- No need to select any Port. Because we will use AVRISP mkII for both burning the bootloader and uploading sketches.
- Now choose Tools > Programmer > AVRISP mkII slow (MicroCore).
- Before burning bootloader, make sure you are providing external power to the microcontroller at pin 8 (VCC)and pin 4 (GND). If all connections are good, you should see the green LED light on your AVRISP. Now you can click Tools > Burn Bootloader.
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Upload Sketch
Now let’s upload the typical blinky sketch to the newborn ATtiny chip. You should see everything same in the code, except for the pin number here is 4 instead of 13 or LED_BUILTIN. 4 stands for the PB4 pin from the datasheet which is the 3rd pin on the chip.
void setup() {
pinMode(4, OUTPUT);
}void loop() {
digitalWrite(4, HIGH);
delay(1000);
digitalWrite(4, LOW);
delay(1000);
}
As I said before, you don’t need to select a port to upload. Just keep the AVRISP mkII connected and hit Upload. That should do the job.
