[Jekyll-labs]

Hi All,

I just finished a quick re-build of a lightning simulator using a Attiny85 and wanted to share the results.

The light is a 12v flood lamp (like this one for automotive uses), and is plenty bright to light up a room (or blind me temporarily if I look in the wrong direction). The rest of the parts are pretty cheap. $4 for the capacitors, voltage regulator, and mosfet, and maybe $2 for the Attiny85. It’s super easy to build on a breadboard, but I was already printing a PCB for something else, so I added on to the order.

Here are the schematics and Fritzing diagrams.

Is anyone else working with Attiny85 chips? I see a lot of the older posts using PICAXE chips, but I’m more familiar with the arduino ecosystem.

As an aside, this is a great project for those getting started with Arduino. If you use an uno or nano, you only need to buy the mosfet, the light, and the power supply.

 

[corey872]

Looks neat! I'm sure the camera doesn't do it justice to actually being there. I haven't done any work with the Attiny's or PIC's. Pretty much just grab an arduino for whatever I need. I've actually done a 180 degree turn... years ago, I couldn't see why anyone would use an arduino when they could just build a small, simple circuit. Then I started realizing one arduino could cover just about every 'simple circuit' I ever built, plus a ton more!

With that said, I have done some strobe, flicker and lightning effects with the arduino - generally make pretty good use of the 'random' function - to keep things lively, but still in sort of a jittery / natural / random nature.