Whirly-Gig: Charlieplexing and SoftwareServo on ATtiny45

I recently completed a project involving an ATtiny45 and wanted to share it with the world. The idea came from the world of FIRST robotics. At competitions some teams have spinning banners ("whirly-gigs") above their pits to attract scouters, judges, and anyone else who might be interested. I had a friend who saw it and told me to make one for her birthday. Sounds like fun! Let's get started.

Hardware involved:

• 1: ATtiny45
• 1: HXT900 Servo (modified)
• 1: Momentary Switch
• 1: 10k Potentiometer
• 1: 5V Voltage Regulator
• 1: DC Power Jack
• 1: 2 Way Switch
• 1: 3 Battery AA Holder
• 6: 5mm Colored LEDs
• 3: 270 Ohm resistors
• Wire

Software Involved

• ATtiny Arduino core
• SoftwareServo Library
• Charlieplex Library
• My Arduino Sketch

First, the ATtiny core. I have done several posts involving ATtinys in the past. Follow the instructions from the link above to use an ATtiny with the Arduino IDE.

Second, the SoftwareServo Library on the ATtiny. I have already done a post on controlling servos with an ATtiny. Find it HERE. Basically, the regular Servo library will not work because it doesn't have the necessary timer, so SoftwareServo must be used.

Next we have the Charlieplex Library. It takes care of setting the pins correctly to turn on the LEDs we will be using. I have done a post on this library as well. Find it HERE.

Last we come to my sketch. You can get it HERE. It may be a bit convoluted , so I tried to comment it to be understandable. The essence is this, there are 10 different LED modes that the user switches between by pushing a button. At the same time the servo which has been modified for continuous rotation as discussed HERE is controlled by turning a 10k pot.

I made a nice wooden base for the electronics and mounted the servo on 2 wooden uprights. The sign itself is made of dowel rods and home insulation foam cut into circles. I made it such that an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper will fit on it when rolled horizontally.

I soldered together all the electronics. I put a 270 Ohm resistor on each LED pin. I also put a 10 uF electrolytic capacitor across the power leads and a diode protecting against unwary users plugging in power backwards, but those probably aren't necessary.

I did run into one problem in the course of this process. The servo would stop working when I set a certain LED pin LOW. I never did get to the bottom of it, but it is discussed in THIS forum thread. I ended up changing the pins I was using, and it solved the problem. I included a diagram of my pinout in the code posted above.

That's about all the details I am going to give you. The whole project took quite a while, and it's a DIY project. I'm not selling kits. If you want, you can view my project photos HERE, and I took a nice video for you to look at. I hope I inspired you to greatness.

-Matthew

Charlieplexing on an ATtiny85: 3 pins, 6 LEDs

While exploring the world of ATtinys and Arduinos I came to a problem. I needed to control 4 LEDs with only 3 pins. Well this is a problem. I scurried around trying to conceive a clever way to borrow a pin from another application to no avail.

Having previously encountered multiplexing, I turned to that. There I found my solution. Charlieplexing. According to Wikipedia, Charlieplexing uses the tri-state logic capabilities of microcontrollers to control gobs of LEDs with a few pins. The details of Charlieplexing are a bit confusing. I don't feel fully qualified to explain them, so here are the important things to know.

1) An Arduino pin can be in 3 modes: OUTPUT: HIGH, OUTPUT: LOW, or INPUT. When a pin is set as an input, it is put in a high-impedance state. Outputs are in a low-impedance state. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see THIS link.

2) LEDs (Light Emitting Diodes) only work in one direction. If you did not know this you may have at some
point wondered why your LED was not working. Don't worry. Ignorance isn't a crime...that I know of.

3) Your Arduino (even your ATtiny) can turn LEDs on and off many more times a second than your eye can see. Think how a video shot at 30 frames per second (NTSC TV) looks. That's 30 Hz. A "normal" Arduino runs at 16 MHz (16000000 Hz). Now granted you can't turn an LED on and off that fast, but you get my point. I will be running the ATtiny at 8MHz. This is the fastest you can run it without external hardware.

All this combined means that I can control 6 LEDs with only 3 pins. Great! Next I searched for a library to take care of all the heavy lifting. Introducing the Charlieplex Library. This library takes care of all the tedious stuff to let us worry about what we want the LEDs to do at the Macro level.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to use the library because the Arduino playground page does a pretty good job. However, for those that are interested HERE is my code. It is a basic modification of the SimpleCharlie example to control 6 LEDs.

To the right is a schematic for how to wire up the LEDs. There are also resources available on Google to help you do that. HERE is one resource on how to draw your own schematic. Video would be rather anticlimactic, and I have already disassembled it. The schematic will have to do.

Hope this works for you. 

-Matthew