A Smarter Solar Water Heater

Installing solar power at a home is a great way to reduce electricity bills, especially as the cost of solar panels and their associated electronics continue to plummet. Not every utility allows se…

Spice Up Your Earrings With Microelectronics

We’ve covered [mitxela] in the past and if you know him, you’ll likely know him for putting the micro in microelectronics. This year, he’s at it again with his LED Industrial Pier…

Arduino Measures Remaining Battery Power With Zero Components, No I/O Pin

[Trent M. Wyatt]’s CPUVolt library provides a fast way to measure voltage using no external components, and no I/O pin. It only applies to certain microcontrollers, but he provides example Ar…

ACK1 Makes Getting To Know The ATtiny1616 Easy

Many readers will be familiar with Microchip’s ATtiny85, which has been a popular choice for DIY projects in the past for its low price and (for the time) small size. But those looking for a …

Reverse Engineering A Classic ThinkPad Battery

The ThinkPad 701 is an iconic laptop series from the mid-90s and is still highly sought after today because of its famous butterfly keybaord. The laptop itself is tiny even by the standards of the …

Electronic Shoe Explores Alleged Chess Misbehavior

A few months ago, a scandal erupted in the chess world which led to some pretty wild speculation around a specific chess player. We won’t go into any of the details except to say that there i…

Lisp Runs This Microcontroller Pendant

As a programming language, Lisp has been around longer than any other active language except for Fortran. To anyone who regularly uses it, it’s easy to see why: the language allows for new sy…

Come Learn About New ATtiny Generations

As the chip shortage hit, a lot of the familiar ATtiny chips have become unavailable and overpriced, and it mostly stayed the same since then. If you ever searched for “ATtiny” on your …

Tiny RC Truck And Trailer Motors Around Tabletop

Most RC cars replicate real-world race cars or fantastical off-road buggies for outdoor escapades. [diorama111] is an expert at building tiny desk-roaming models, though, and built this exquisite m…

$1 POV Display Goes Round And Round

You don’t need much to do a persistence of vision display. A few LEDs and a processor is all it really takes. [B45i] made a simple PC board with five LEDs and an ATtiny CPU. There’s a b…

Overengineered Fume Extractor, Version 2

We all know the temptation of adding one more feature to your latest project. [Arnov Sharma] didn’t resist the urge. Building on his 3D-printed fume extractor, he developed a new version made…

Tiny Dongle Brings The Hard Drive’s Song Back To Updated Retrocomputers

Back in the “beige box” days of computing, it was pretty easy to tell what your machine was doing just by listening to it, because the hard drive was constantly thrashing the heads back…

Tiny GPS Logger For The Internet Of Animals

[Trichl] creates a tiny GPS logger, called ‘TickTag’, that was designed as an inexpensive location tracking option for animal studies. The low cost, tiny form factor, and large power de…

Pocket Radio Powered By Tiny Microcontroller

Before the days of MP3 players and smartphones, and even before portable CD players, those of us of a certain age remember that our cassette players were about the only way to take music on-the-go.…

Bug Zapper Counts And Serenades Its Victims

Not many creatures are as universally despised as mosquitoes, whether it’s the harmless kind that, at worst, makes you miss winter, or the more serious ones that can be a real threat to your …

A Neat Little Tool To Reset The Fuses On Your ATtiny

If you’re an experienced hacker, you’ve probably run into a problem at some point and thought “let’s make a tool to automate that”. A few hours later you’ve got …

Miniature Motorized RC Car Is Massively Impressive

Small is often subjective. For example, a school bus is small compared to an Airbus A380. But other things are just small all on their own and need no comparison to make the point. Such is the case…

HVTPI Primer And Toolkit Equips You For BOM Substitutions

Novel programming interfaces for MCUs might catch us by surprise, but then we inevitably get up to speed with the changes required. Today’s bastion is HVTPI – a “12V reset” …

I2C To The Max With ATtiny

The Arudino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the m…

I2C To The Max With ATtiny

The Arudino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the m…