This week we were asked to program our board to do something. I already had placed a blue LED and a button on my board from week 6, electronics design, so I was now ready to try to program it. My first approach was to program the board using the terminal and avrdude on the Mac in the physics lab. Here are the steps that were involved:

In the terminal: $ avrdude -p attiny44 -c usbtiny //This specifies the avr device and the programmer type to confirm the pcb is connected.

Rob pointed me to an example .c file in the tutorial section from last year for getting the button to trigger an LED. I needed to change a few variables to match the pins that I had used for my button and LED.

cd to the directory where the .c and .make files are.

Enter command: make -f LED.make

Enter command: make -f LED.make program-usbtiny-fuses (to make sure the clock is set to 20 MHz)

Enter command: make -f LED.make program-usbtiny

At this point the programmer cable could be removed and the button triggered the blue LED!

After getting the board loaded through avrdude, I wanted to make sure that I could program the board on my own computer. For this I decided to use the Arduino IDE and followed the instructions in this tutorial from HighTechLowTech. I was then able to select the ATTiny as the board, the ATtiny44 as the processor, 20MHz external clock, and the USBtinyISP as the programmer. Once all of these settings were correct, I was able to burn the bootloader and then remove the fabISP. I tried uploading few of the example sketches such as the LED fade to make sure that everything was working properly.

After programming my blue led board, I wanted to try wireless communication using the nRF24 module. My idea was to use a piezo as a sensor to detect a knock and then transmit a signal to another board which would blink an LED. After talking with Dan Chen about the necessary steps and reading through his tutorial, I decided to make two copies of his Dandurino board (slightly changing the design to use a 20 MHz resonator instead of a crystal with two capacitors), which uses an ATmega328p so that there are more available pins, and also breaks out the pins into several headers for easier prototyping. This seemed very appealing to be able to potentially swap out a piezo sensor for a pressure sensor, or send a signal to a motor in addition to an LED.