Digispark is a small, low-cost development board compatible with the Arduino environment.
The Digispark project was started by Erik Kettenburg as a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter, where it raised
Digispark is open hardware under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license, having shared the schematics and firmware. This has favored the creation of cheap clone boards. We can buy it for approximately one euro from international sellers on AliExpress or eBay.
It is powered by an Atmel Attiny85 processor, an 8-bit AVR processor with RISC architecture. The Attiny85 incorporates 8KB of flash memory, 512B of EEPROM, 512B SRAM, 6 I/O lines, 32 registers, 2 timers, a 4-channel 10-bit ADC converter, internal watchdog. The operating range is from 1.8 to 5.5V, and it has three power-saving modes.
The main features of the Digispark boards are:
{ “CPU and Memory”: [ { “label”: “Processor”, “value”: “Atmel Attiny85” }, { “label”: “Memory”, “value”: [“8kB Flash (6k minus bootloader)”, “512B SRAM”, “512B EEPROM”] } ], “Connectivity”: [ { “label”: “USB”, “value”: “Integrated on board” }, { “label”: “Power Supply”, “value”: “USB (5V) or external source (7-35V, recommended <12V) with automatic selection” }, { “label”: “Regulator”, “value”: “5V and 500mA” }, { “label”: “HID Emulation”, “value”: “Act as a keyboard or mouse” } ], “Devices”: [ { “label”: “I/O Pins”, “value”: “6 (2 used for USB if used)” }, { “label”: “Interrupts”, “value”: “On all pins” }, { “label”: “PWM”, “value”: “On 3 pins” }, { “label”: “ADC”, “value”: “On 4 pins (10bits at 15 ksps)” }, { “label”: “Interfaces”, “value”: “I2C and SPI (via USI)” }, { “label”: “LEDs”, “value”: “Power and status integrated” } ] }
There are two versions of Digispark. In the most common version, the PCB itself extends, acting as a USB port. The other version has a micro USB port on the board. Both models have the same price.
There is also a Pro model, which is based on the Atmel Attiny87 processor. The Pro model has 16KB Flash memory, 14 I/O pins, ADC on 10 pins.
Personally, the increase in price and size of the Pro model makes it less interesting to me, compared to other alternatives available in the price range.
In summary, Digispark is a development board that stands out for its small size and low price, but sufficient for small projects. In future posts, we will see the pinout of this board and how to program it with Arduino IDE.
