For his Hackaday Prize entry, [danjovic] is pushing whatever limits are left with the ‘tiny85. He’s using it as a test pattern generator, pushing out pixels to any old TV. The entire circuit is powered by a coin cell, and the entire thing fits in a Tic-Tac box.
The heart of the project, as you would expect, is a resistor ladder using all six available pins, using five for luminance and one for the sync. That is thirty-two shades of gray, if you’re keeping track. The trick is using the internal PLL and a bit of math to calculate the proper resistor values. The result is just a test pattern, yes, but [danjovic] managed to get a test pattern that has a resolution of 850 pixels across. That’s not bad by any measure.
Of course, if grayscale isn’t your thing, you can also use the ‘tiny85 to send Never The Same Color over the air or even push out the jams over a VGA port.
Old cars are great. For the nostalgia-obsessed like myself, getting into an old car is like sitting in a living, breathing representation of another time. They also happen to come with their fair share of problems. As the owner of two cars which are nearing their 30th birthdays, you start to face issues that you’d never encounter on a younger automobile. The worst offender of all is plastics. Whether in the interior or in the engine bay, after many years of exposure to the elements, parts become brittle and will crack, snap and shatter at the slightest provocation.
You also get stuck bolts. This was the initial cause of frustration with my Volvo 740 Turbo on a cold Sunday afternoon in May. As I tried in vain to free the fuel rail from its fittings, I tossed a spanner in frustration and I gave up any hope of completing, or indeed, starting the job that day. As I went to move the car back into the driveway, I quickly noticed a new problem. The accelerator was doing approximately nothing. Popping the hood, found the problem and shook my head in resignation. A Volvo 740 Turbo is fitted with a ball-jointed linkage which connects the accelerator cable to the throttle body itself. In my angst, the flying spanner had hit the throttle body and snapped the linkage’s plastic clips. It was at this point that I stormed off, cursing the car that has given me so much trouble over the past year.