10pcs MH-Tiny ATTINY88 Micro Development Board 16Mhz /Digispark ATTINY85 Upgraded/Nano V3.0 ATmega328 Extended Compatible for Arduino IDE 1.0+ (OSX/Win/Linux)

Ignore the negative reviews because all I'm hearing is people who don't know how to use the product. If you're used to working with the Attiny85 but get frustrated at the lack of GPIO pins, this is the product for you. With 26 GPIO pins and 8 ADC inputs, you don't need to mess about with shift registers to increase the usefulness of an ATTiny85. Because the board lacks a USB to UART chip it consumes less power - another distinct advantage over boards like the Arduino Nano. It uses a software USB bootloader from Digispark to emulate the typical USB chips on Arduino and ESP development boards. It took me ten minutes from unboxing to getting these hooked up to the Arduino IDE and they work like a charm. At just over $2 per board through Amazon, it's not worth ordering these from China just to save a few cents. A great buy.

First to get the IDE setup, you have to point it to some random .Json file which one day could be made into a virus or simply stop working like the acorn oak digistump did. Secondly, the thing doesn't work. Press the upload button, it asks you to plug the device in but then it just stays there.Anyway, I tried lots of things to try and get it to work. I'm done. I'm going to buy something else unfortunately. I wasted time and money. This is not a microchip meant for use. It was meant to be made thinner using a hammer, which I will be doing tomorrow.

This takes a bit of extra work to program with the Arduino interface, but well worth it. I used the first one for a fading RGB LED project. The on-board regulator is enough for most of my projects, and the large I/O count means you can control a lot of things. The headers are unsoldered, which is actually a good thing. You can solder only one side and mount on the edge onto a mother board. The price is insanely low. There must be like a 3 cent profit margin. The 10-pack ensures you have them on-hand for building.

UPDATE: Turns out that the ATTinyCore package by SpenceKonde "just works" on Apple Silicon, so the below procedure is unnecessarily overcomplicated. The only nitpick is that the micronucleus bootloader only connects over USB if the reset button on the board is pushed after "upload sketch" being clicked in the IDE.These are some great inexpensive development boards for small projects. I did have some trouble getting these to work, so I would like to briefly document my issue and workaround.The official MHEtLive package for the Arduino IDE was not working for me as the compiler toolchain would not run on my Apple Silicon (M2) laptop. The error message I got was "avr-g++: bad CPU type in executable." Suggestions to try running the Intel binary of the Arduino IDE using Rosetta also did not work.I assumed support for Apple Silicon would not be provided any time soon, so decided to try building binaries on my Raspberry Pi instead.First, I installed arduino-cli on my Raspberry Pi and tried installing the official MHEtLive core. Unfortunately the core did not specify a build of the micronucleus bootloader usable on my OS. I modified the package_mhetlive_index.json to omit the micronucleus binaries from the "tools" list to allow arduino-cli to install the mhetlive core. I then checked out the micronucleus repo and built my own binary. This way, it was possible to compile the binary for the mhetlive:avr:MHETtiny88 board using arduino-cli with the "-e" flag set to export the compiled binaries, then use the micronucleus binary I built to upload the binary to the development board.Ultimately I ended up installing ATTinyCore by SpenceKonde into the development environment on my Raspberry Pi and using its ATTinyCore:avr:attinyx8micr board as the build target instead. ATTinyCore looks to be much better maintained and documented than the MHEtLive core, and it has the facility to compile for many other targets (e.g. other ATTiny microcontrollers). The binaries built with this core specified are uploaded using micronucleus as well.I did need to install udev rules to allow micronucleus access to the Raspberry Pi's USB ports but that was simple--I just needed to download a rules file and follow some instructions included within.It is probably possible to work around most of this by programming via the ICSP pins instead of over USB.

There are already many reviews that describe the "unusual" way to program this board via IDE. Actually that's not even the hard part. Just download the drivers into the boards manager in the IDE, follow the instructions and you're good.But now come the real issues:- The board doesn't have a USB port which is "seen" by the PC, which means you can not write output to hardware serial (meaning you don't see anything in the serial window in the IDE). What you need to do is to use software serial, connect the two RX/TX wires to a FTDI 232, connected to USB on your PC and open a terminal window your PC. But it gets worse: the program memory is so small (6k) that in real life you probably will not even be able to use software serial.- As already described: the Micro-USB connector is so flimsy that I broke one off right after a few uploads until I figured out that I actually can keep the USB cable plugged in and just need to press the reset button to start the upload (only for the very first upload you actually need to plug in the cable).- But the big killer was for me that in all of the 5 boards that I got, only the ADC converters on pins A6 and A7 worked. The ADC converters on A1 - A5 were dead on all boards. That was a killer for my project as I needed to read 4 different analog inputs. Maybe I just had a bad batch, but the same problem on all 5 boards?Lesson learned: Use an Arduino Nano.