Flightless Angels

Here is the project deployed in our yard. It’s running on a 6v battery via a 7805 regulator and has so far lasted about 14 hours. Click on the image to see a video.

Looks like I’m steering away from installing the eyes in furry animals and am mounting it on a wire frame instead. Here are the 14 sets tied to the frame while the Sugru hardens.

While I was working on my Furry Friends project for Halloween I had the need to program 12 Atmel ATTiny45 chips before I soldered them up. I could have programmed them in-circuit but then I thought of this.

	This board was originally for code development. Once the development was done I desoldered the chip and put epoxy around the wires to make it robust.
	Originally I was holding the chip onto the board while hitting return on my ‘make upload’ command but that was pretty hit-and-miss. Enter Sugru. I drilled a couple of registration holds on either side of the SOIC pads on the board. Then I glued a chip to the board with carpenters glue and put a dollop of Sugru on top of it and let it set.

Then I pulled out the chip and trimmed it up a bit.

To program the chip I gently clamped the sugru to the board and programmed. Viola! I programmed the 12 chips without a hitch and saved a couple of hunded dollars on a SOIC programming socket.

Sugru!

Here is the development board repurposed as a programmer, and the first assembly. Once I have a few of them I’ll encase them in epoxy and/or Sugru.

Here is this year’s Halloween project. The picture is of an ATTiny45 driving a couple of LEDs via PWM to make them periodically fade up, blink at you for a while and then shut off. It’s running on a 2016 coin cell which gets me about 18 hours of use (not bad). I’m going to make 10 or so of these and put them in some my daughter’s old stuffed animals. Then I’m going to put them all together and have them collectively stare and blink at you. There are two obstacles;
1. Time
2. My wife, who isn’t keen on me mutilating perfectly good stuffed animals. I may have to skulk around the foggy streets and playgrounds of our town in a cape, looking for victims.