Inspired by this Make Magazine youtube video, I would like to use the ATtiny chips instead of the Arduino for most of my projects. The video author warns that some Arduino functions won't work on the ATtinys. Is there a complete list of what is and is not supported?
Electronic – arduino – What can’t the ATtiny do that the Arduino can
arduinoattiny
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Best Answer
Update: To better answer the question, ATTiny's can do anything that don't require hardware the ATTiny's are missing, which include the hardware serial port, hardware i2c, or multiple interrupts. Since this is hidden away in the Arduino Libraries, unless you have a good understanding of how they work or read the actual library files, things like the Wire library (hardware i2c) will not work.
From http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,5582.0.html:
Additionally, most ATTiny's have no hardware multiplication, so a compiler would have to do non-base-2 multiplication in software.
Finally, Arduinos rely on a bootloader instead of spi programming, so you need an ATTiny with atleast 4~8kb flash for them to work with the Arduino bootloader.
ATTiny44/45/84/45/2313 are popular as micro-Arduinos. They have about a fourth or eighth of the ram and flash of a ATMega328 that the official Arduino Uno uses.
There are many ATTiny's, so no single statement can be said about them all.
Also see here: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1695