Will and I have been working on some electronics fun, mostly because I wanted to try this Instructables using a microprocessor.

Of course, this was one of those things where you need to complete some projects in order to do the project. In this case we needed to build an AVR programmer so we could program the microprocessor (an ATtiny85). Building the programmer was fun, and Will did a whole bunch of the soldering!

Once that was done, we tried programming the chip…

…and the trashing began. It turns out I didn’t understand how to read the pinouts from the programmer. But once we got help and re-wired and re-tried, we finally got it working! We were able to make our NeoPixel Ring do cool things via this nice code.

One of the things we want to do with all this is help Jack have an “arc reactor” and “repulsers” for his Iron Man suit, so we needed an easier way to program and test our chips, because it was a little hard to work with wires for programming vs. wires for trying things…

So this morning I made this…

…which let’s me program and test easily without a bunch of jumpers and without having to keep moving the chip back and forth. Pretty sweet, and cost about $2 in parts (the board was $1.25).

And now we have easy-to-use joy. :)