• Enclosure has arrived

    spro • 12/29/2015 at 09:00 • 0 comments

    I came back from holiday vacation to discover a Shapeways box waiting on the doorstep. Inside I found two copies of the 3d printed cube enclosure, which came out looking nice, fit together well, and let enough light through to show up in sunlight.

    The light is a little unbalanced in the corner but that's more an issue with the LED placement than the cube itself.

  • Designing an enclosure

    spro • 12/11/2015 at 08:51 • 0 comments

    Starting with a fork of the ATTinyTemp enclosure i created a rounded cube enclosure for the blink(inch) in OpenSCAD. It is just a bit larger than an inch^3, and thanks to the original parametric design the only real effort went into making sure the hole for the USB plug was the right size.

  • Boards assembled

    spro • 12/11/2015 at 03:18 • 0 comments

    To test the circuit I used the HID mouse wiggling example from http://codeandlife.com/2012/02/11/v-usb-tutorial-continued-hid-mouse/ . I've had troubles with enumeration before with V-USB and ATTiny85 but having the 3.6V zener diodes seems to mitigate that -- it enumerated on the first try.

    I also ran a non-USB color fading test with pleasant results

  • PCBs have arrived from OSHPark!

    spro • 12/08/2015 at 20:44 • 0 comments

  • Design files, next steps

    spro • 12/03/2015 at 10:43 • 0 comments

    The design files are now in this repo: https://github.com/spro/blinkinch. It includes the Eagle schematic and board files plus a .zip of gerber and drill files

    While I wait for the PCBs to arrive from OSHPark I'll use an equivalent breadboard to start developing the firmware and driver.

    My current conception of the driver exposes a service with a single method:

    setRGB(r, g, b, message=null)
    Scripts can go about their business (e.g. poll the bitcoin price) and call the service when they want to display some information (e.g. setRGB(255, 0, 0) when the price is declining). The optional message parameter can be used to explain the change, potentially showing up as an unobtrusive notification (like Growl).