Arduino newbie

Development Boards Arduino
1

Not sure if this is the right section to be posting but here goes.

My interest is model railway control using DCC and to date the projects that I have built have used Microchip PIC series of micro-controllers. Recently while searching the web I came across a site (https://rudysmodelrailway.wordpress.com/) using a ArduinoTiny 85 board. I would like to try to utilise such a system but I have no experience with Arduino or ATTiny micro-controllers so I would like to pose a number of questions if I may.

There are several Arduino Tiny85 boards advertised on the web. Are they likely to be interchangeable? Does it matter which one I buy?

How do I program the board? For the Microchip projects I have several programmers (PicKit 2 etc). Would I use the USB port on the Tiny85?

Which software must I use? The project site talks about Arduino IDE. Does the IDE software compile the program into a way that the board / chip can understand ie equvilent to a PIC hex file?

Gareth

2

  1. It really depends on what other features are on the board and depends on what you mean by “interchangeable.” As far as the codes goes, yes.

  2. You can use a programmer such as the AVRISP (discontinued), various Atmel tools, or third party programmers. If you have an Arduino, you can also follow this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30rPt802n1k and use the Arduino to program the Tiny.

  1. See above. The Arduino IDE will generate the correct file with that. Atmel Studio also has an Arduino add-on or you can write it using the provided ASF.
3

Thanks for the reply. There are still a number of projects that I would like to build for my railway and I have more or less come to the end of the Microchip projects and hence my reason for looking at the ATtiny and Arduino as they are becoming more common in the railway modeling field. In the project I have in mind it uses a ArduinoTiny 85 board. However on Ebay there seem to be several variants of this board available and hence my question about interchangeable. There is also a kit available locally known as a Olimexino-85-kit which also appears to be the same as shown on the web site I mentioned albeit in kit form.

I will install the IDE software and play around with the files that the Railway Web site makes available and next time I am in the City I will buy one of the kits and see how it goes. I will also consider buying an Arduino UNO as that seems to be the starting point for many projects.

Many thanks.

Gareth