Congratulation and many thanks to all our supporters and friends

Posted on 2017-02-212022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

Tinusaur Indiegogo campaign 179 percent funded

We are 179% funded! This would’ve not happened without you.

Quick stats:

179% funded on February 20, 2017
$4,675 USD total funds raised

We will be posting updates regularly, as often as there’s something to update you about.

All the best,
The Tinusaur Team.

PLEDGE: We will make the Tinusaur Car

Posted on 2017-02-192022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

As you may have noticed we’ve extended our campaign by a couple of days to allow more people to get their perks over the weekend.

We’re 175% over our original goal, $4522 raised – with 12 hours still left to go.

We’re so excited that we’ve decided to make this pledge: if we reach 200% or $5000 (whichever happens first) before the end of the campaign (i.e. in about 12 hours) we promise that we will make the Tinusaur Car – a 2-wheel mini car that can follow a line – and we will make it available on our website.

We are already building a working prototype.
(picture above)

What can you do to help us reach our next goal?

Go to our campaign https://igg.me/at/tinusaur support us – get a perk.
Share our campaign link https://igg.me/at/tinusaur with your friends or through your social media channels.

Wish us luck for the next 12 hours!
The Tinusaur Team.

Funded 140% and only 16 hours left

Posted on 2017-02-162022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

We are 140% funded and there are only 16 hours left of our Indiegogo campaign.

This would’ve not happened without your support. 🙂

By continuing to support our cause you will help us get even more Tinusaur kits to our students.

Not interested in getting a Tinusaur board? You can donate to the project! Our promise: we will spend the money to bring the Tinusaur boards to even more students … as we’ve done it before.

Neither of those is for you? No problem. You could just share our campaign link https://igg.me/at/tinusaur to your social media channels such like Facebook, Twitter, or whatever you prefer.

Just a quick reminder: After the campaign is over the price of the boards, the kits, and the shipping will go slightly up so now is the best time get a bunch them.

Thanks again for your support.

Indiegogo Campaign is Almost Halfway Through

Posted on 2017-02-092022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

Last week we’ve launched our Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign and, as of a few minutes ago, we’ve reached 1/3-rd of our goal already. 🙂

In case you’re not familiar what the Tinusaur project is about …

A small board with a tiny chip on it that comes as an assembly kit – a small package with parts and you get the chance to learn how to solder it. This circuit is so simple that there are very few things that could go wrong. It’s been around for over 3 years and used in schools and universities to educate young people in both hardware and software. With this campaign, you could help us produce more of the Tinusaur boards, bring the cost down to $3 per basic “lite” board and allow more people to be able to get them.

The Tinusaur boards are powered by the Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller. You could program your Tinusaur board with the Arduino development environment, or if you chose so – using the plain old C/C++ compiler, or … using whatever you prefer.

The success of this campaign will help us produce our boards and kits in much larger quantities and bring the coast down. That will allow us to have the basic “lite” boards for as little as $3/pcs – that will make them available for even more people.

Help us spread the word – just share it. But, if you like the idea and the project, you could back us up. Here’s the link: https://igg.me/at/tinusaur.

Thanks in advance for your support.

We’re planning to launch new Indiegogo campaign for $3 boards – next week

Posted on 2017-01-272022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

With the growing interest in our project and kits, we decided to plan for and launch another Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign – next week.

The goals:

to make 1000 or more boards;
to bring the cost for the Tinusaur Board Lite down to $3 a piece.

The link for the campaign will be http://igg.me/at/tinusaur.

Some of our team members will be at the FOSDEM in Brussels on the 4th and the 5th next week – will be glad to meet anyone interested in what we’re doing.

Our first workshop for this year

Posted on 2016-03-192022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

Tinusaur Workshop Soldering Plovdiv Hackafe

Our first workshop for this year took place couple of weeks ago in Plovdiv at Hackafe. It was part of a much larger event about microcontrollers, robotics and internet-of-things.

This time, it was for 2 days and in 3 parts.

Part 1 (day 1) was an introduction to the microcontrollers for everyone that was just starting – short 30 minutes presentation and then discussions about various problems that one may experience while working with input/output. It was interesting to see some observation by people that have no much experienced about buttons and the noise that they may produce, then … how do we do debouncing.

Part 2 (day 2) was soldering. Everyone got Tinusaur Starter 2 kit. No one had difficulties assembling the board – there’s no much you can get wrong with this board.

One of my friends shot a timelapse at one of the tables.

Part 3 (day 2) was the fun part.

We wrote the blinking LED program – that was easy.

Then we started experimenting.

As it is an old Bulgarian custom to wear Martenitsa in March we made some blinking ones with the Tinusaur.

We also managed to play polyphonic tunes using ELM – Wavetable Melody Generator.

But the most unusual thing we did was to make an old floppy disk drive play a melody.

Thanks to Vencislav Atanasov (https://github.com/user890104) for the idea.

The inspiration was from Moppy – the Musical Fl oppy by SammyIAm.

Oh, by the way, incase you’ve not heard it yet 🙂 …

We have recently launched a Tinusaur crowdfunding campaign at Indiegogo so if you like what we’re doing please support us at http://igg.me/at/tinusaur.

Tinusaur and Digispark – should we compare?

Posted on 2016-02-272022-01-01 by Neven Boyanov

Compare Raspberry Pi, Arduino Uno, ATtiny85 Tinusaur

These are questions that we’re often asked:

How is it better than ****** ?
How is it different from ****** ?

First of all you should not compare the Tinusaur powered by Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller to things like Raspberry Pi (or any other platform running 32/64-bit RISK processor) or Arduino (running on ATmega or similar).

In fact, the Tinusaur should be compared only to something that has 8 KB (kilobytes) program memory and 512B (bytes) data memory, has also 5 or 6 input/output connectors.

But the more important question here is …

Why the Tinusaur even exists?

The Tinusaur project concept is LEARN BY DOING THINGS. That mean if you want learn how something works you should create one yourself – from scratch if possible.

The opposite to that would be to order something from Internet, open the box, connect some wires, copy/paste code from website, see that the LED blinks … and that’s all. Period.

So, if you want to create the simplest possible microcontroller system … the Tinusaur is your friend. It is a small plastic bag package that has all the parts that you need to assemble your own system powered by Atmel ATtiny85 microcontroller. You need to have soldering iron though.

Then, you can write some simple programs following the tutorials here on this website (or elsewhere, if you prefer) and from this point on it is little different from any other ATtiny85 based board.

Let’s Compare

If you’re still not convinced why it is not possible to compare it other more powerful platforms here are some technical parameters.

	Raspberry Pi	Arduino Uno	ATtiny85/Tinusaur
Processor	ARM11 – 32-bit RISK	ATmega328P 8-bit RISK	ATtiny85 – 8-bit RISK
Frequancy	700 MHz	16 MHz	1 MHz (up to 20 MHz)
Memory RAM	256/512 MB	2 KB	512 B
Memory PRG	On-board SD slot	32 KB, 1 KB EERPROM	8 KB Flash, 512 B EERPROM
Input/Output	8×GPIO, UART, I²C, SPI …	6 analog, 14 digital	5 or 6 analog/digital
Peripheral	USB, audio & video, HDMI	–	–
OS	Linux, etc.	–	–
Dimensions	85×56 mm (48 cm²)	68×53 mm (36 cm²)	28×20 mm (6 cm²)
Weight	45 gr.	28 gr.	9 gr.
Power	500 mA, 700–1000 mA	50 mA	1-2 mА, 300 µA idle (0.1 µA standby)
Cost	35 USD (25 USD)	20 USD (10 USD)	5 USD board 8 USD starter kit

* values are typical, may differ by application
** prices depend where do you buy it
*** some of the data may be little outdated but still relevant for rough comparison

It is obvious that these 3 product categories are very different.

Let’s just mention that Tinusaur/ATtiny85 advantages are:

Size – small, less than 1 in²
Wight – light, about 9 gr
Power consumption – low, extremely low in standby
Price – affordable to everyone

Worth mentioning that the price of the Tinusaur board with all the parts could go as low as 2 USD or less if produced in thousands pcs.

The Digispark

Digispark by Digistump is GREAT!

It is actually the Digispark that we should compare the Tinusaur to.

Here are some the things that we believe are advantages of the Tinusaur over the Digispark:

You can assemble it yourself thus learn one more thing – how to solder.
You can use all of the 8KB flash memory because you don’t need what’s call bootloader (needed for the Digispark USB connection) that takes about 2 KB so you have less than 6 KB left for programs.
It is cheap and will get cheaper – down to 2 USD and we start producing in thousands.

Another thing to mention is that the original high-quality Digispark by Digistump is 8.95 USD. You can still buy the generic quality clone for under 2 USD on various websites.