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Another fun little project

A project log for T85 Target

A mini Attiny85 target dev board

mcunerdmcu_nerd 08/29/2018 at 15:230 Comments

My latest use for the board is using it as an artificial lightning bug/firefly of sorts in terms of a flickering light. I was originally running the Attiny85 at 8 MHz.  The average power consumption was a little bit over 3 mA, but seeing as I was running it off a pair of AA batteries I wanted to see if I could do a bit better.  

I looked up the typical power consumption curves on the datasheet and by switching to using the 128 KHz oscillator dramatically lowers the power consumption a bit.  I did so (and also disabled the analog compactor and got power consumption down to I'd say a little bit over .5 mA.  I though about clocking it down to 16 KHz but the ADC wouldn't operate with a clock that low (using the ADC for random number generation.)  Even if I could keep the ADC running with a 16 KHz clock, it would likely provide little improvement as the LED itself would become the major bottleneck. 

I'll post the files for both the 8 MHz and 128 KHz variants.

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