My New Toy Has Arrived

Hello again!
As usual, I’ve not had a post up for a while so I thought I’d bring you in on a new toy I’ve discovered called the Adafruit Trinket. It comes in two flavours, a 3.3v and a 5v (5v being my preference) and has an ATTiny85 chip on board. Now, I’ve experimented with the ATTiny85 before, I’ve been playing with them for quite a while working on projects that only use a very limited number of logic pins (there are very few on the ATTiny85, hence that Tiny part of it’s name).

Adafruit have done something very special though. What they’ve done is added a USB bootloader to the chip so that it can communicate directly with a PC, sort of. You can program it via USB without any kind of programmer hardware and when it’s plugged in to a PC, it can mimic a HID (that’s Human Interface Device in case you wanted to know, think keyboard, mouse, that kind of thing) so it’s perfect for the project I have in mind. I’m planning a panic button that with send the Windows + M key at the press of a button to minimise all windows in um… Windows when pressed. It’s a simple proof of concept but the little Trinket is more than up to the task. If you take a look at this project on the Adafruit site, you can see its capable of much more than I’m asking of it.

Anyway, I just thought I’d keep you clued in on what I’m up to. If I get a chance I’ll either get a video or at least a few photos up here for the panic button project.