Adafruit's New ATtiny1616 Breakout Comes with Seesaw Firmware

For projects built around microcontrollers, accessing peripherals like EEPROM, ADCs, or NeoPixels is straightforward. However, sometimes you need more pins. Or you are using a single-board computer (SBC) running Linux, like a Raspberry Pi. Adafruit's seesaw firmware on the new ATtiny1616 breakout board is an excellent way to quickly add real-time capabilities to a project.

Adafruit's seesaw firmware runs on a microcontroller, like Microchip's ATtiny1616, and communicates with a host controller via I2C. With this arrangement, the host sends commands over I2C, and the board (or microcontroller on the board!) handles the timing-specific aspects.

For example, consider NeoPixels. These LEDs with built-in shift registers have a very finicky timing protocol. As a result, an SBC's GPIO pins may not have precise enough control to run NeoPixels correctly. Fortunately, an Adafruit ATtiny1616 breakout running seesaw can drive the NeoPixels while communicating with an SBC running Linux or any operating system that can run CircuitPython. (There is Arduino library support for seesaw, too!)

The Adafruit ATtiny1616 breakout is exciting because the ATtiny1616 microcontroller is part of Microchip's newer MegaAVR product line. Despite its tiny package, it contains 16 kilobytes of flash memory, two kilobytes of RAM, and 256 bytes of program-accessible EEPROM. Additionally, it has an internal oscillator capable of operating at 20 MHz.

For the breakout board, Adafruit added a 3.3 volt regulator. However, the ATtiny1616 can operate from two to five volts. The Adafruit breakout board runs on 5 volts by default, but you can easily enable the onboard regulator to interface to 3.3 volt devices.

With the seesaw firmware, the Adafruit ATtiny1616 offers your projects:

• 12 GPIOs with pullup resistors
• 9 analog Inputs (10-bit)
• 5 PWM outputs (8-bit)
• 1 NeoPixel output (supporting up to 250 pixels)
• 127 bytes of EEPROM
• 1 interrupt output
• 1 activity LED

For more information on what the seesaw firmware can do, what processors (breakout boards) it supports, and how you can use it, check out this seesaw firmware Adafruit Learning System tutorial. The Adafruit ATtiny1616 breakout board is now available for $4.95 (before shipping.)