Some time ago, I decided to build simple but decent LED stripes, to put them under my PC’s displays and illuminate the keyboard and the working space directly beneath. I used 5 V LED strips, since plugging the light into a free USB port, seemed to the be easiest way to power the light.
If you solder a lot, you probably own at least one pair of so called “helping hands”. In my experience the ones you get nowadays are less heavy (smaller and therefore lighter foot) and all in all cheaper, than the ones you could buy one or two decades ago. Unfortunately I couldn’t find better ones,…
There are different versions of stands/holders/dispensers for holding the reels of solder and allow yourself to conveniently unwind them, as needed. Most of them are made of metal and can handle multiple reels. I decided to build some myself using wood, plywood and small brass tubing, I already had laying around.
Since I didn’t had one, I decided to build a simple breakout and ISP board for 8-pin ATtiny microcontrollers, like the ATtiny13 or ATtiny85.
The Atmel ATtiny2313a is one of the less common micro controllers. It’s basically a ATtiny13a with more ports/pins.
