So a while back I splashed a little cash on Kickstarter. I hadn't seen or heard of any Arduino's that were as small as the Digispark and I thought it'd be interesting to play with. I pledged a little higher than I should of, with the intention of sharing the Digisparks around (to split the cost of delivery and customs charges) and when they started offering shields to go with the Digisparks I put my name down for several.
That was in September. Roll forward to today when I received a little parcel in the mail.
First thing that caught me by surprise was that it was just a little parcel. These Digisparks don't take up much room at 19mm x 26mm (less than an Inch x an Inch) and even with breakable headers, sockets and shield kits the parcel was pretty light.
First thing I did was upload an LED blink test script. Naturally I went on to tweak the test script so it glowed instead of flashing. Unfortunately that was all I had time for during my lunch break. When I got home from work I quickly put together an RGB LED shield and tried the test script, it did a good job of blending the colours together and I started pondering what uses I was going make of these interesting little boards.
At only 6 I/O pins (two are shared with USB, so there are only 4 I/O pins available if you want to use it plugged into a computer), things may be a little limited but who doesn't enjoy a good challenge?
The Digispark has hardware I2C support so those few I/O pins could be put to good use with items such as this LCD or a range of sensors.
I'll have to stop here for tonight. Hopefully I'll be able to share some examples and interesting uses of the Digispark in the near future.