Adafruit Trinket 1501

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outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#289270 24-Aug-2021 14:19

I purchased a Trinket 1501 ages ago and finally found a project to use it for. Temperature display using a DHT11 and Max7219 7 segment 8 pixels lcd module. Both from jaycar.

I've tried quite a few of the Arduino libraries / examples.

Has anyone managed to get this to work? Seems I need a driver that is compatible with ATtiny85 based boards. They all seem to be AVR based.

richms

28178 posts

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Lifetime subscriber

#2766160 24-Aug-2021 18:45

I have had really bad luck with both the trinket and digisparks because they do not have a real USB chip on them and do some not in spec bit banging, and if you want to actually use the USB to communicate with the PC once your code is on it, then there are huge limitations to what you can and cannot do.

I would suggest grab a more capable micro with either native USB, or a USB to serial chip on it, that way you are not at the mercy of timings etc. Wemos D1 minis with the ESP8266 wifi MCU are my choice for things because theyre cheap, can make things do IOT easy enough, and despite what some people say the IOs are 5v tollerance based on what the designer of the thing says.

Richard rich.ms

outdoorsnz

674 posts

Ultimate Geek

#2766407 25-Aug-2021 10:55

richms:

I have had really bad luck with both the trinket and digisparks because they do not have a real USB chip on them and do some not in spec bit banging, and if you want to actually use the USB to communicate with the PC once your code is on it, then there are huge limitations to what you can and cannot do.

I would suggest grab a more capable micro with either native USB, or a USB to serial chip on it, that way you are not at the mercy of timings etc. Wemos D1 minis with the ESP8266 wifi MCU are my choice for things because theyre cheap, can make things do IOT easy enough, and despite what some people say the IOs are 5v tollerance based on what the designer of the thing says.

I did manage to get the LCD matrix working. Cough cough it was a wiring issue! The pins connecting the trinket to the mini breadboard were not quite tight enough. Screw fixed that. Yes soldering would be a better idea when I find some.

Did you manage to work out a way to get data back to the connected computer via usb serial?

About the only use I can see is LCD display, DHT 11 temp / humidity and simple time chip to display the time - all offline.

Longer term I will get hold of a ESP8266 as these looks really cool for the low cost! This is just to refresh my electronic skills and bit of a project during lock down.

eonsim

398 posts

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#2766715 25-Aug-2021 21:07

I think you would be better to grab an ESP8266 or ESP32, they can send the sensor data via wifi to your computer via mqtt or Home assistant (esphome). They will also quite happily control the LCD module and can be programmed by micropython if you want. Note you can pick up ESP3266/32's of AliExpress for less than $10.