Introduction And The Big Picture

Tiny-Cairoduino is a small-sized Development board based on the beautiful ATtiny85 chip from Atmel. Don’t get fooled by its small size, it’s powerful with great potential and well-documented resources built around it. We wanted to make a small-sized and low-cost development board that fits in any project without hesitation. You don’t need to give up your expensive Arduino or Raspberry pi board anymore to build your project. Blow up your cheap Tiny-Cairoduino board and buy another one, EASY!

There are a lot of open-source Duinos out there, I’m building one more open-source Duino-inspired board but with some addons and features that I was searching for. Tiny-Cairoduino is mainly inspired by the Digispark and the Trinket boards. Thanks to the open-source community. The main goal of the Tiny-Cairoduino board is to integrate the strength points from all the available ATTiny85 based dev boards and come out with a new beast that is easy to program and easy to play with on the hardware level too. And, totally open-source!

Our plan is to develop a whole set of shields that helps hobbyists and newbies to easily implement their hardware projects like if they are assembling lego bricks. We are currently working on that and we will be publishing these shields very soon.

I told you before, Don’t get fooled with its size! Despite being so small The Attiny85 chip has 8K bytes of flash memory and 5 I/O pins. All the 5 GPIO pins can be programmed as digital inputs or digital outputs. Including ADC(analog input) on four pins, PWM(analog outputs) on three pins -more can be achieved with software PWM-. It literally plug and play thanks to the preloaded bootloader that helps you to reprogram the board over USB like any Arduino board. Tiny-Cairoduino is also compatible with Arduino IDE. Even though you can program your Tiny-Cairoduino using the Arduino IDE, it’s not fully 100% Arduino-compatible. There are some things you trade-off for such a small and low-cost microcontroller!

• Tiny-Cairoduino does not have a Serial port connection for debugging so the serial port monitor will not be able to send/receive data. But, you still can reprogram your board through the USB connection.

Some computers’ USB v3 ports don’t recognize the Tiny-Cairoduino’s bootloader. Simply use a USB v2 port or a USB hub in between.

Tiny-Cairoduino specifications:

1. Support for the Arduino IDE 1.0 and later (OS X, Windows, and Linux).
2. Built-in USB for programming.
3. 5 I/O pins (2 are used for USB only if your program actively communicates over USB, otherwise you can use all 5 even if you are programming via USB).
4. 8 KB flash memory (about 6 KB after bootloader),
5. I2C and SPI (vis USI).
6. PWM on 3 pins (more possible with Software PWM).
7. ADC on 4 pins.
8. On-board power indicator LED.
9. On-board WS2818B addressable RGB led (connected on pin 4).
10. Keyboard or other HID devices emulation (mouse, gamepad …).
11. Handy pinout header to easily connect your Tiny-Cairoduino with the outside world.
12. On-board RESET button.
13. A whole set of shields to maximize and expand the board functionality.
14. Four mounting holes!

For all the technical details and the source files. Please check out makesomestuff.org/tiny-cairoduino-kit/