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I posted just a bit about the ATtinyNoisy boards I had made from OSH Park, but there’s plenty more to tell.

My original plan was to use CR2032 batteries with these, but I found it just didn’t have enough juice to make noise, so I tried using two CR2032 batteries and that didn’t work much better. I ended up grabbing a nearby 9 volt battery to test with, and that worked well, and since I had a bunch of 9 bolt battery connectors, I chose to use those ordered a bunch of new 9 volt batteries from Amazon.

When it came time to program and assemble all the boards, some of them worked, and some didn’t. I wondered if it was because some of the chips I got were from different vendors, including some on eBay that were probably counterfeit. I spent way too much time chasing the wrong problems until I figured it out. (Maybe you’ve already figured it out!)

When I originally tested with a 9 volt battery in the shop, it was an old 9 volt battery that was down around 7 volts. Do you know what the voltage rating for the ATtiny85 is? Well, it’s 2.7 V ~ 5.5 V. Yeah, I was trying to feed it too much voltage!

At this point I had soldered on the battery connectors and was staring at a dozen brand new 9 volt batteries. The board didn’t have room for a LM7805 voltage regulator and I didn’t have time to get new boards made. I ended up taking the 9 volt batteries and shorting them with jumper wires until the voltage dropped to about 7 volts, at which point they worked fine. Yeah, I just wasted lots of electricity to get them working properly. NBD.

Below is an example of what they sounded like.

The idea was to make a bunch of these, and put them in a space, and then interact with the space and experience the sound coming from different directions. You can’t really experience it through a video, as you need to be in the space and move through it to participate in the piece.

The code is dead simple, and just does an analogWrite to a PWM pin on the ATtiny to generate some noise.

// ATtinyNoisy

int piezoPin = 0;
int randomPin = 1;
int randomValLow = 0;
int randomValHigh = 255;
int interValLow = 1;
int interValHigh = 3000;

void setup() {
  pinMode(piezoPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  randomSeed(analogRead(randomPin));
  analogWrite(piezoPin, random(randomValLow, randomValHigh));
  delay(random(interValLow, interValHigh));
}

Each ATtinyNoisy unit was placed in a paper bag, and hung from a piece of monofilament fishing line with a binder clip. (I had plenty of binder clips around!)

Here’s a few more photos from the installation that I did at UWM’s Kenilworth facility during SHiN|DiG on Friday, December 16, 2016. With many of my installations (and work in general) I focus on cheap things, often simply presented. I tend to go with the theory that if you can’t make something large, make a lot of little things.

Big thanks to (former) student Maks for helping with the install and uninstall of this piece.