AVR Drivers: Difference between revisions

Of course you will need a flashlight driver circuit board first. There are several NANJG drivers available that include an Atmel TINY13A chip that can be programmed. These chips can also be locked down so they can't be changed, but so far none seem to be. However, some variants of NANJG drivers use a PIC chip that can not be programmed with AVR tools. See [[Popular drivers]] to see some of the drivers people have been using. Most of these use current regulators to limit the current delivered to the LED while the Atmel chip itself turns the power on and off very quickly, leaving it on for full power, or flashing on and off quickly to simulate a lower mode. As the percentage of off time increases, the light gets dimmer. By setting the on-off cycles to a high frequency, the eye just sees this as a lower mode even when the LED is barely lit. This is called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). By slowing the flashing more, you get a visible strobe mode or SOS modes. So essentially the Atmel chip is just a computer-controlled on-off switch.