When [Adam, HA8KDA] is not chaotic with his PhD studies, he mentors a team of learners fascinated in engineering. To educate them a large variety of subjects, he established out to make a smaller and entertaining embedded project as they observe and take part alongside the way. With this LED-adorned ATTiny13A venture, [Adam] demonstrated schematic and PCB style, then taught C++ principles and intricacies – specifically when it comes to developing very low-footprint computer software – and tied it all with each other into a true-earth system students could choose residence following the task. His training course went way over and above the “Hello world”s we normally hope, and some of us can only desire for a university working experience like this.
He shares the PCB files and software with us, but also talks about the C++20 framework he’s designed for this ATTiny. The ATTiny13A is extremely low-priced, and also very limited – you get 1K of ROM and 64 bytes of RAM. This framework allows you make good use of it, delivering the basic principles like GPIO wiggling, but also factors like lower-electric power operation hooks, tender PWM with optional multi-stage operation support and EEPROM access. College students could produce their own animations for this product, and he contains them in the repo, much too!
In educational tasks, it pays to retain code direct and clean, cruft-less and accessible to college students. These are the things you can only attain when you definitely understand the equipment you’re working with, which is the excellent situation for teaching about them! [Adam] intends to present that C++ is additional than ideal for small-resource devices, and tells us about the EEPROM class code he wrote – compiling into the very same sum of guidance as an Assembly implementation and consuming the same volume of RAM, when giving compile-time checks and are unsuccessful-protected syntax.
We have talked about using C++ on microcontrollers right before, obtaining excess compile-time functions with no overhead, and this venture illustrates the thought properly. [Adam] asks us all, and in particular our fellow C++ wizards, for our viewpoints on the framework he developed. Could you realize even additional with this easy hardware – make the code far more robust, cleanse, have it do a lot more inside the minimal resources?
What could you build with an ATTiny13, specially with these kinds of a framework? A flashy hairclip wearable, maybe, or a code-finding out RF-remote-controlled outlet. We have also seen a very small camera set off for endurance races,, a handheld Flappy Chicken-like console, and several extra!
