Stardweeny evolves into StarTiny: PCBs sent to production!
20 January 2012
The Stardweeny finally has its own PCB! The first version was based on a Solarbotics Ardweeny on a perfboard, but I wanted to lower the cost and especially the manufacturing complexity.
Enter the StarTiny
I made the new StarTiny PCB with gEDA. It is based on the ATtiny13 microcontroller from Atmel, as the name suggests. The tiny13 has just enough storage space to hold the necessary firmware for the star. It comes in a compact 8-SOIC package that fits neatly between the five LEDs on the board.
The Order
I ordered 10 of the StarTiny PCBs through BatchPCB, a Sparkfun-related frontend to the Chinese Gold Phoenix PCB fab. The boards are only 1.25” to a side, so the cost comes out to only $3.95 per board. There’s a $10 per-order tooling fee (for panelization and human design verification) and a $5 shipping fee.
The Files
As you may have read in the first post on the Stardweeny, I’m sharing the design files freely. I want anyone to be able to share in the simple joy of soothing, blinky LEDs! The effect is really quite charming. Also, if you want, you can order your own PCB directly via BatchPCB.
Please note: I have not yet received these boards from the manufacturer, so they aren’t tested. As usual, no guarantees!
StarTiny v1 by Travis Geis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.