ITP Blog

Light and Interactivity

Week 4&5

Diving deeper into my 12-volt light kit, I decided to tackle with the Attiny85, the idea of having a smaller controller and setup was tempting. The procedure was pretty straightforward, I used my arduino nano as the programmer and uploaded a simple blink sketch to the attiny, one thing I noticed right away was that the delay(1000) for some reason took so much longer than 1 second to complete, maybe has to do with the internal clock.

I took bits of code from my original 12 volt arduino file, I used the Kalman filter again to smooth out the input, I also changed the code to exponential fade, my personal favorite. But the reduced resolution to 8 bits was pretty obvious, specially in the dimmer spectrum, the corn bulb would not light up at all past a certain point, whereas with my nano it did.

Switching my light bulb to an MR16, I noticed it flickered with lower PWM values, I thought it was still the noise from my input, but after changing the code and testing with the corn bulb, I think it's the light that does not like the values below a certain point, for now I have it as is but I think the only work around in this case would be to stop sending PWM below a certain threshold. Or maybe it's the lower resolution on the attiny causing it.