Convert Digispark into Blink(1) or Blinkstick

[cpldcpu]

It seems that there is a lot of interest in USB connected RGB indicator LEDs and several incarnations of very similar products emerged on kickstarter and elsewhere.

Two I noticed are Blinkstick http://www.blinkstick.com/ and Bllink(1) http://thingm.com/products/blink-1.html.

I just wanted to point out that they are all open source and based on an ATtiny45/85. That means that you could emulate these products with a Digispark and a RGB LED connected to. You can find the firmware here

Blinkstick: https://github.com/arvydas/blinkstick-firmware
Blink(1): https://github.com/todbot/blink1/tree/master/hardware

I have not tested it, but it may be of interest, especially considering that the digispark costs about a third. That said, the people behind Blink(1) did a fantistic job with product design and software integration and you should buy their product if you like it.

[Bluebie]

This should be relatively straight forward. The Blink(1) is wired a bit differently to the digispark to give access to all 3 pwm outputs, for the LED, and trading off not having i2c/spi port (which they don't use), so the straight up firmware will not work on a digispark, but with a bit of modification of the usb config section to use the digispark's pins, and adjustment to use a software pwm on the remaining RGB channel, or changing it to use ws2812 or similar LEDs which have their own PWM controller, it should work great!

It looks like you'll also need to use the Blink(1)'s write eeprom command to install a serial number and some patterns manually, because digispark/micronucleus doesn't have a way to upload EEMEM sections through the bootloader. Would be a neat project though

I think another cool one to emulate would be the Griffin PowerMate - those weird metal glowing blue knobs that were popular a decade or so ago - they still have nice apps for controlling various things. I think it'd be neat to make a digispark shield which was a big resistor ladder loop, for use with capsense-style touch sensing to make what would effectively be a click-wheel input device that'd work with the powermate software. Powermate also has an LED (only blue though) which can be pwm'd to an 8-bit value.