ATtinyBadge RevA

Copyright © 2026 Brian Kircher

Open Source Software: you can modify and/or share it under the terms of the BSD license file in the root directory of this project.

ATtinyBadge

This project is a small (75.2 mm by 44.7 mm) circuit board in the shape of the FIRST® logo. Each symbol in the logo is painted the appropriate color, and has a set of 11 LEDs (of matching color). It is powered by a single CR2032 coin cell battery, which provides a typical run time of N hours.

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Once turned on, a random, short animation is played one a minute. Once in a while, a special, longer animation is played instead. Pressing the button causes another animation to be played without further delay (canceling the one minute delay). Holding the button for two seconds turns the badge off, placing it into an extremely low power mode. This also happens after the badge has been running for eight hours (so it doesn't run continously until the battery is fully depleted). When off, pressing the button turns it back on and repeats the process.

Full details of the design, development, and construction process can be found here.

Hardware

The board is designed using KiCad, with the design files and resulting gerbers provided in the hardware directory. It uses 6/6 design rules, with a 12 mil minimum drill size, so it should be easily manufactured by any number of prototype board shops (so long as they are able to make the very odd, non-rectangular shape of the board). My personal preference is PCBWay.

The components are populated by hand (since the board has components on both sides, the hot plate technique only works for one side!), and the PCB is then hand painted to match the FIRST logo and protected with a coating of a spray shellac. Safety pins like these are soldered to the exposed pad at the top of the back and used to attach the badge to a shirt/lapel/etc.

Firmware

The firmware that runs on the ATtiny1616 is written using TinyGo, and is provided in the firmware directory. One space saving optimization that could be done is a custom target that does not enable the timing services that are a standard part of the TinyGo targets; that timer is simply disabled after the application starts, making all the timer setup code effectively "dead code" (even though it still exists and runs).

The firmware can also be built and run natively (using normal Go) in order to develop, debug, and test new animations. It uses ANSI control sequences with the command line terminal to generate an ASCII-art simulation of the LED array, with the LEDs "lighting up" as defined by the animation (with the same timing).

Trademarks

FIRST® is a trademark of For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), which does not sponsor, authorize, or endorse this application.

It is very much hoped that this does not ruffly any feathers at FIRST, especially since the color palette could not be exactly adhered to with off-the-shelf acrylic paints.