Usblinky
What
usblinky
- is a small usb stick with 4 wires on on end
- controls up to 150 addressable RGB lights (for example WS2812B)
- can run stand alone from a USB power supply once programmed
- consists of:
- ATTINY85
- micronucleus 1.11 bootloader based on vUSB
Software
usblinky uses the micronucleus bootloader that speaks USB in software and enables the ATTINY85 to be programmed directly over USB.
A modified arduino environment for this task can be found here
All the sources are available on github.
How
I started this project after pl, chris and I went to make munich 2015 to represent the metalab and the hackerspaceshop.com project there.
It was a blast!
On the second day a guy asked for a microcontroller and a high power led to illuminate a 3D-printed vase he made.
We had no Highpower RGB leds on hand but we gave him a microcontroller and a piece of ws2812 ledstrip (thanks to pl for that great idea!)
Turns out it looked pretty groovy.
So the next day the guys returned the microcontroller and ledstrip and asked if this could be available as a kit.
I said that a full blown ATMEGA32U4 is a waste of resources for that kind of application.. and this is how this project started.
Johannes from ehajo was also there showing off a usbstick with an attiny2313 on board that can be used as a AVR programmer.
I got a handful of these sticks and made a new firmware to drive ledstrips with it.
But this microcontroller was too small to do fancy effects and so i made a completely new design for this job.
Pitfalls and lessons learned
Adafruit trinket pinout differences in trinket and digispark design
Alternate usecases
A usblinky stick was used in the selfiebooth installed for the time travellers party.
This stick illuminated a big white button that spits out "PING\n" over USB keyboard when pressed
Who
- Overflo -The whole USBLINKY project.
- clifford, marius - OpenSCAD THANK YOU!!
- cs - vUSB from OBDEV is amazing. Thank you so much.
Media
(in case there is no embedded video look here and here
