Das Blinken Board Mini

In 2009 a group of people from The Robot Group got together and made the Das Blinken Board.

This is an attempt to make a smaller more simplified version with the lowest part count and least TCO. The result is the Das Blinken Board Mini

What really makes this possible is LEDs that have built in resistors to match a typical 5V setup. This makes for a very low part count way to blink some LEDs. The ATtiny84 can easily run down to 3V (as long as you are not doing any timing critical functions.)

The TCO for the board is about $5.81

The MISO, MOSI, and Reset lines are left unused. So it is easy to re-program the board or to use those final 3 pins as:

• Programming
• A 8 position input. Store 8 patterns then turn each pattern on/off by chainging the states of the 3 pins. (3 bit binary)
• Serial input like UART, SPI, I2C.

Bonus: This works quite well in the Arduino™ IDE. Using the MIT Tiny Cores

The MCU runs at ~8Mhz with the internal oscillator.

For completeness There should be a 10KOhm pull up resistor on the RESET line(Pin 4). Some research shows that the chip has a internal pullup on the reset line. But I could not confirm that. It would make sense however since the line can be used as an output and Atmel processors feature a pull up on all output pins.

For tips on hand soldering surface mount see online tutorials like this one.

Software Copyright (c) 2013 James Delaney

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MIT-License

Hardware Copyright (C) 2013 James Delaney

Licensed under CERN v1.1