MightyLight

Sorry about the delay, I've been busy for these past few weeks with various activities including configuring a new laptop. Anyways I got a chance this afternoon to take a video of it. Sorry about it not exactly being 1080p but I don't own any "newish" camcorders (the one I used was a hand-me-down from a relative.)

Okay, the bright white flickering LED on the dev board doesn't look that impressive. I've been experimenting tonight with different materials to diffuse the light and a yellow LED. It looks similar to a flickering candle. I found that a spare NyQuil-like measuring cap diffuses the light nicely although I want something a bit longer.

I just tried some wax paper rolled into a cylinder. It doesn't look half-bad but it's a bit flimsy.

UPDATE: I just added a photo of my experimentation of using wax paper to diffuse the light from a yellow LED.

Okay, I'll admit that right now the flickering LED doesn't look all of interesting. I'm brainstorming ways to make it more interesting. The journey on the other hand is a bit more interesting, and I'll be talking about what I learned in the project details and I'll talk about some of what I learned here.

Creating the program has been a good refresher as it involves things such as interrupts, ADCs, hysteresis, the watchdog timer, and more.

I did create something somewhat similar a while back under the Arduino IDE but for this project I went with using the AVR-GCC toolchain directly for a few reasons. The first reason is program size. While the Arduino IDE is very convenient to get things up and running, that conveniencence does come at a price: generally larger compiled program size in comparison to using AVR-GCC. You can make things a bit leaner by doing mostly coding things in the same way that you would under AVR-GCC such as direct port manipulation.

As I test, I decided to to a comparison of my program size at the time of this writing under both AVR-GCC and and the Arduino IDE. I did have to make a few slight modifications for it to work under the Arduino IDE but here are the end results:

AVR-GCC compiled size: 978 bytes

Arduino IDE compiled size: 1190 bytes

The Arduino IDE compiled program size is about 22% larger vs compiling it under AVR-GCC which isn't too bad but the binary generated by the Arduino IDE would clearly puts me over the HaD 1kB size limit. Now if I started using the things that you typically use under the Arduino IDE such as pinMode() it would have been much worse and I may do a demonstration of this in a later project log.

Another reason I decided to use AVR-GCC is to gain a deeper understanding of AVR microcontrollers. Under the Arduino IDE I can easily do a lot without reading the datasheet for the Attiny85, but using AVR-GCC makes me rummage though the datasheet which results me in learning some interesting things. I learned about the internal temperature sensor in the Attiny85 when I was reading up on ADC. I also learned that there is much more to PWM than what analogWrite() provides.

Anyways this project log has gotten pretty long, so I'll end it here.