Pseudonymous maker “g0730n” has turned a Microchip ATtiny85 microcontroller right into a self-contained game-capable eight-bit microcomputer with built-in interpreter — squeezed right into a Tic Tac field and powered by the solar: the Tiny Bit Machine.
“[The Tiny Bit Machine is] photo voltaic powered, battery free {hardware} to run an interpreter on the [Microchip] ATTiny85,” g0730n explains of the compact challenge. “Consumer enter is 5 buttons on a resistor ladder on ADC2 of attiny85. Relying on what menu the consumer is in, they may do various things. The units output are two purple LEDs. I selected purple on account of low ahead voltage, and it’s simpler on the eyes if utilizing the machine in low mild.”
The entrance of the gadget, initially constructed on prototyping board with a customized PCB model within the works, has simply two LEDs, labelled “1” and “0”. Beneath this are left and proper buttons, and three extra labelled “S”, “T”, and “R” for “Toggle”, “Save”, and “Run” respectively. Impressively, that is every part you want: with persistence, it is doable to jot down packages immediately on-device utilizing g0730n’s Tiny Basic Reusable Key phrases (TGRK), an interpreter made particularly for the ATtiny85.
For energy, the compact gadget makes use of a 1.5F 5.5V supercapacitor, charged by a small photo voltaic cell put in within the rear of the upcycled clear Tic Tac case. Because of the minimalist {hardware}, it is sufficient for a surprisingly lengthy runtime: after between 3-6 minutes of charging, you may get 30-45 minutes of energetic use earlier than the Tiny Bit Machine enters a deep-sleep mode — at which level you will must recharge it in case you do not need to lose your progress.
“I used to be capable of pack a ‘absolutely’ useful ‘RPG’ [Role-Playing Game] sport in 127 bytes,” g0730n writes of the machine’s first fully-fledged software program title. “Assume Pokémon on a one dimensional linear map with solely 2 LEDs to know what’s going on within the sport. This was fairly the problem, however I’m glad I used to be capable of program it in TGRK as an alternative of including it into the Arduino sketch.”
“It ended up having rather a lot much less options then initially deliberate,” the maker admits, “however I feel with the precise tweaks the issue could make it pleasurable to play. That’s in case you do not thoughts studying the binary codes blinked out to watch your well being stage, and subtracting or including to these blinks to know what number of hit factors you misplaced within the final battle, or how a lot gold you simply spent on therapeutic on the inn.”
Full challenge particulars, together with a invoice of supplies and supply code, can be found on Hackaday.io; the TGRK supply code is obtainable on GitHub underneath the permissive MIT license.