name: Jonathan Ward
class: How to Make (Almost) Anything
term: fall 2008
project: attiny 44 pcb board design w/ flex circuits


flex circuit on bottle

flex circuits are easy to make, and you can stick them on many things.

note: when mounting flex circuits, put lots of hot glue around places where things get plugged into the board or places that could easily get damaged.

quick and dirty with the gimp

I was trying to find the fastest way to produce a modification of the echo.44 board, so this was painted with the Gimp and vinyl cut. The layout on the right is for the echo 45, and was also designed with the Gimp. I added four LEDs and a push-button to the board, and it works well. I'll make a pretty one when I have time or need to make a small compact board, but for this project I just wanted to make boards as fast as possible and experiment.

stuffed tiny 44 flex circuit

this is an image of the stuffed board. I added jumpers to connect things quickly a well as make certian parts modular, so I would not have to remake them each time I wanted to change the design of the board.
This board works.

the next step was to create my interactive game

the game works by flashing one of the LEDs a number of times between 1 and 9, and it asks you how many times it blinked. if you type the correct number it tells you you're right and fades the LEDs for you, and if you're wrong it tells you you're wrong. You then press the button to try again.
below are some screenshots of what happens on the computer.

The code was done in Assembly. This was my first experience with writing Assembly. There were basically three steps to integrate this code with Neil's hello.echo code.
1) Compare values in registers
2) Make LEDs fade on and off with delays
3) Integrating a button, and using it for a random generator
here is the code.