HeartBit V1

HeartBit V1.1 Updates:

Removed the ON/OFF switch! No more forgetting the switch ON and depleting the battery in a few hours. The new HeartBit is much smarter, as soon as the sparkling animation ends the CPU will automatically switch off the power resulting in huge power savings. Furthermore, the new design is more elegant and magical, it takes just one push to make your HeartBit glow
Extreme battery saving upgrade resulting in more than 500 button presses
Moved from the old ATTINY85 to an all-new ATTINY816
Exposed six GPIO pins to hack your HeartBit in unexpected ways
Managed to keep the same pricing

How about an ultra small, cute, electronic heart that makes vibrant light animations? Meet the HeartBit

HeartBit started as a fun project in the laboratory with some key points in mind:

Create the smallest electronic heart possible
Make it beautiful, meaning that it should have lots of RGB pixels to create a nice rounded shape
Be as power efficient as possible! Its powered only by a small coin cell battery and there are lots of pixels in there, so making it last as long as possible was quite a challenge
Code some high quality light animations

This mini black heart is powered by a small coin cell battery (CR2032, not included) on the back. It is already preloaded with a dozen of light effects written by the team.

Nevertheless you can hack it and make your own effects and projects by re-programming it using the ISP interface and an AVR programmer like the UsbtinyISP . The MCU is the mini all-mighty Attiny85, so there is already lots of support for it from the community

Such a small-cute heart should be easily carried, right? That's why we designed a small hole on the top left corner to be mounted on a keychain, hanged from your backpack or even used as a nerdy necklace! Your imagination is the limit

How to use:

HeartBit is very simple to use, you just add a CR2032 coin cell battery inside, turn on the small ON/OFF switch on the back and its ready to run! Pay notice on the polarity of the coin cell, since it wont run if you put it backwards. The plus side should be on top, as shown in the image below. You should be careful during the battery placement so that you slide the coin cell battery under the metallic grip shown on the following, left image and then push it to securely click on the battery holder (bottom right image).

On the other side, you wont make any damage to it, that's why added a protective diode there. It will always make an animation, as soon as you witch it ON so that you know it works and the battery is OK. As soon as the animation ends you can press the gold button on the top to make another animation. Be careful to always switch off your HeartBit as soon as you end playing with it, else the battery will be drained! If you like coding, you can use an ISP programmer, like the USB Tiny ISP, download the code from GitHub, and change it to makes your own cool animations