The Tinusaur Online Store Opens

Tinusaur Starter

UPDATE about the online store: (1) Please note that this is the website of the Tinusaur Foundation – a non-profit association for public benefit, and we don’t have an online store; (2) The Tinusaur Boards and related products are offered by another organization, which is a business entity and has a website at https://tinusaur.com. Finally, our online store is up … Read more

February: Quick update

Tinusaur Project Milestones

This is quick update for what is happening in the lab. The design of the board is pretty much final. We consider this as release candidate marked as RC1 – it probably won’t change much or not at all. It is available on 123d.circuits.io at this address: http://123d.circuits.io/circuits/116696. You can order the PCBs there or if you prefer … Read more

Tinusaur Starter: We are making a beginners kit

Tinusaur Starter Kit

To start making things with the Tinusaur you need the board, the parts, a programmer with a cable and couple of LEDs to make your first blinking lights program for ATtiny85 microcontroller. We’re ordering the PCBs and the parts from the manufacturers and it seems that the total cost for the full package will be … Read more

Tutorial 001: Blinking LED

Tinusaur Tutorial 001: Blinking LED

UPDATE: New version of this tutorial is available on the Tutorial 001: Blinking LED x1 page. This is a very simple tutorial on how to make a LED blinking. Since the Tinusaur board is a very standard ATtiny breakout board this could be applied to almost any such other board. The code was tested to work with … Read more

The Tinusaur Board Designing Principals

In this post are discussed some of principals used while designing this board. Size and form factor The goal of making this board is not to have a smaller or the smallest PCB that runs on ATtiny. The goal is to have a board that could be used for prototyping simple projects as well as … Read more

The new prototype PCBs just arrived from OSHPark

Tinusaur PCB

The new prototype PCBs just arrived from OSHPark – great quality as usual. I noticed that there are only few things that I may change before call it official: slightly move some components around so they fit better and become easier to solder; add one jumper for switch on/off the optional button cell battery on … Read more

Oscilloscope-like Circuit – Preview

This is a oscilloscope-like circuit for the Tinusaur, it is not a real oscilloscope but could be used as a base for one. It is built on top of the Tinusaur board (Atmel AVR ATiny85) and Nokia 3310/5110 LCD (PCD8544 controller). There is also simple preamplifier for the electret microphone connected to the ADC of … Read more

Tinusaur powers a tiny vibrating robot

Here it is – the first Tinusaur powered robot. This is a vibrating robot that could turn left, right, and move forward. I decided to build that after watching a video on YouTube about the Kilobot project from Harvard University. Mine is much simpler and a lot less capable. But hey, that’s the first version … Read more

Tinusaur Proto v0.1 m1 – Prototyping and Design Considerations

I have finally managed to finish the first version of the schematics and PCB‘s and to order the first 3 pieces. This work is based on some previous experiments and designs. Schematics The schematics is nothing special – it is the well known minimal configuration for the ATtiny plus just few addition components – some of them … Read more

The Tinusaur – What is it

Briefly, the Tinusaur is a minimal micro-controller hardware configuration based on Atmel AVR ATtiny family of products and more specifically those with DIP-8 case such as ATtiny25/ATtiny45/ATtiny85, ATtiny13 as well as their variations. The goal of the Tinusaur project is to have a simple, cheap and accessible quick-start platform for everyone interested in learning and … Read more