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Motococo

Servo-motor and LED-light controller


  • At: Taoyuan Art x Technology festival, Taiwan
  • By: Tuomo Tammenpää
  • For: Dimension Plus
  • In: October 2017

Motococo is a small servomotor and LED light controller that is based on ATiny85 chip with an audio bootloader. It is a circuit modification from 8BitMixtape project like the Neocococat, but designed to drive two hobby servos and longer chain of neopixel RGB LEDs. It has a input socket for one analog sensor and line-level audio out pins for easy speaker connection.

Hardware features

  • ATtiny85 with audio bootloader
  • 2x 3-pin hobby servo ports
  • 3x Neopixels on board plus 3pin socket of connecting more LEDs
  • Two-pin audio out port, ready for line-level audio out
  • Socket for LiPo batttery
  • Small formfactor, inexpensive BOM

Motococo uses the Chris Micro’s audio bootloader firmware known from 8Bitmixtape, which allows updating the code by playing back a specific wav file to it. This allows easy change of premade code-patches, without the need to setup a laptop or developmenent environment like Arduino IDE. The code examples are wav audio files and can be “uploaded” to the board using for example a mobile phone and a web browser.

Motococo is continuation for learning a fest, open source software and hardware toolchain and method for designing and making small series PCB’s. Motococo was developed in Dimension Plus Taipei for a servo-motor controller workshop need for TAxT, Taoyuan Art x Technology Festival. 3x Motococo boards were used also in Dalsburk, Finland in mÖrkö 2017 November lightfestival for controlling a “lighpixel” LED light installation, driving 20 Neopixels each.