I was wondering if anyone here knows of any products that utilize the ATtiny85. It appears to me that it's solely used by makers/electronics enthusiasts. I'm asking because I think it would be interesting to see to what products its limited IO and storage can be applied. Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask a question like this – I couldn't find a more applicable SE site.
Electronic – Is the ATtiny85 actually used in any consumer electronics
attinyattiny85embedded
Best Answer
The answer is yes.
Is that surprising?
no.
Why?
Because Atmel can't care at all about a couple thousand hobbyists buying a couple thousand low-cost chips per month. What they aim at with low-cost chip is mass-produced low-cost devices, selling millions of chips instead. Most products in this world need some microcontroller logic, but not much. You really don't need much IO or RAM to make a microwave oven beep. Or to control the charging in a electric toothbrush. Or to set up the sequence in which to start the power supplies inside a complex product¹.
Of course the hobbyist market creates visibility and allows to sell a couple products that are profitable in small numbers; but really, in the greater scheme of things, hobbyists can't sustain a large semiconductor manufacturer.
¹ fun fact, doing power sequencing is something very often done by a microcontroller reserved for that purpose only – you just can't turn on your complex main MCU before power runs. And that's pretty much the upper limit of what an Attiny85 can do – a bit of I²C and a bit of voltage/ADC math, and the memory's full. With a well-known environment to rapidly write down the firmware for that, plus competetive prices, especially for the non-DIP form factors, why not go ATTiny? I hate 'em, personally, but if you're more used to Atmel than to 8051...