I’ve ordered a few of these. These are going to be great for offloading cycles in NETMF projects.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digistump/digispark-the-tiny-arduino-enabled-usb-dev-board
I think I just found [em]the[/em] cheap way to drive a bunch of LED strips in parallel. Nice!
This is my favorite Kickstarter right now. Only 6 pins available, but cheap and tiny.
@ ransomhall
So how would you use this? 4 ports for output on a transistor for each string of LED, and one for sending commands? UART? I’m guessing you want to send specific LED strings on/off.
This is really cool. Thanks for sharing.
There is a similar device already not as small though
I’ve got a couple ExtraCores, which also got their start on KickStarter… ExtraCore (Arduino Compatible) by Dustin Andrews — Kickstarter. Another very small uC package!
The LPD8806 strips use SPI, and the DigiSpark provides enough current to drive a pretty long length, up to several meters. So, one DigiSpark per strip, all driven from a beefy USB hub. The cool part about these is they plug directly into the USB hub, and I can whip up some kind of PC based GUI app to control the strips in “parallel”. This is not true SPI clock synching, as chip select is not available on these strips, but is close enough to be imperceptible to the human eye (a theory we’ll test).
That’s a nice one for sure. It would be doing a lot better if it competed price-wise with Digispark.
Digispark = Attiny85 ($12 via kickstarter.com)
ExtraCore = ATmega328P ($15 from ruggedcircuits.com)
StickDuino = ATmega168+FT232RL ($22 from spiffie.org)
I dunno, that ExtraCore compares pretty dang favorably, given that it’s only $3 more.
each has it’s own narrow niche, and all these types of boards are playing tech leapfrog. i really like being able to prototype on a full size duino, and swapping out to these for a permanent project board. They’re also great little powerhouse co-processors for GHI hardware. Think of it as a DIY “parallelized” signal bus architecture on the cheap.
Regardless, I’m going to be sportin’ one heck of an LED banner in November 
That’s just the single item reward. Actually, now that they’ve reached $75k they’ve dropped the price of everything by $0.50. Also, once you’ve made your first contribution you can get additional Digisparks for $7.50. They also have a wide assortment of shields designed already for these things. But, obviously, it only has a limited amount of pins but will serve very well for those projects that only have one or two components.
Not sure if you can see this w/o being a pledger or not, but here’s a list of the shields available.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digistump/digispark-the-tiny-arduino-enabled-usb-dev-board/posts/289122
Dang, and they’re pulling in pledges at a zippy pace. They’re $5K ahead of when I Iast looked this morning.
Yea, they were around $55K when I bought in a couple days ago.
Up to 85.5k now… I got the 10 pack.
Up to $146,872 as of right now, with 18 more days to go. AWESOME, way to go guys!
Of course, the ATtiny85 itself is $1.18 in ones (8-SOIC package, easily solderable by hand), and requires practically no external components. If all you’re doing is using this to offload some native code, you hardly need one of these boards.
It’s worth the cost to me just for the convenience of the tiny breakout for one-off and proto projects.
Here you go, ATtiny85 breakout, $2.95: https://www.sparkfun.com/products/494?
Same thing, $1.50: http://www.cutedigi.com/arduino-shields/8-pin-soic-to-dip-adapter.html
No USB… Yea, I know… 
I signed up for five, but I wonder how a man and his wife are going to be able to ship thousands of packages within a reasonable time frame.