Based on this project, I made a general purpose dimmer for incandescent bulbs or soldering irons with these advantages:
- Key controlled: There are 3 keys for up, down and turning the load on/off.
- 8 LEDs to indicate the percentage of power.
- Corrected output, so the light/heat of load is linear based on the current dimmer value.
- Saving the value to eeprom to remember the values after reset.
Due to low pin counts of ATtiny13, the LEDs are connected using 74HC164 shift register. This model doesn't have a buffer register so it needs two pins to drive. one less pin than the popular 74HC595.
The input keys are read using a single ADC channel.
The power supply is a well known transformerless, capacitor based one.
Warning: This module is not isolated form mains. it should be kept in a proper plastic casing. The shift register library is platform independent and can be used for any ANSI-C based microcontroller.
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