Arduino as ISP for ATTiny84

Following on in the same vein as my previous articles on Arduino as ISP for ATTiny85 IC, this article addresses the ATTin84. I refer you to the previous posts in the thread ATTiny85 thread for more information on plans, designs and etcetera, particularly Arduino as ISP for ATTiny85.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, there are very few differences between the 84 and the 85 in terms of pinouts. The arrangement and number of the pins are probably the most significant differences. The components required are virtually the same (you need a 14 pin DIP rather than an 8 pin … and obviously, you need an ATTiny84 IC).

Above is the pinout for the ATTiny85 IC and how it connects to the Arduino UNO. Below is the pinout for the ATTiny84 and how it connects to the Arduino UNO.

The differences between the two chips mean that there is some significant difference in the arrangement of the PCB that I designed for the ATTiny85 but the footprint is nearly identical and the ArduinoISP sketch that comes with the Arduino IDE needs no modification at all.

The Blink sketch also does not need modification from the already modified ATTiny85 version of the sketch, however, instead of connecting the LED to pin 5 (PB0), we are now connecting to pin 2 (PB0). Well … I still need to verify that once I’ve finished building the ISP and then breadboarded the ATTiny84 IC in the same test configuration as the previous article. But from my current reading, that should be just Jim Dandy.

Arduino as ISP for ATTiny85

Following on from my previous post (ATTiny85 with Arduino Uno as ISP), I thought that I would have a crack at explaining the method of using the Arduino as an ISP for an ATTiny85.

The first step that I missed, the one that I had a lot of trouble finding, was configuring the Arduino UNO as an Inline Serial Programmer. This is really quite an easy step to complete and doesn’t require anything other than the Arduino UNO, the USB connection to your computer and the IDE.

Connect the UNO to the computer using the USB cable and launch the Arduino IDE.

When the IDE is open, click File > Examples > ArduinoISP. This sketch comes with the IDE, so there isn’t anything to download (so long as you already have the IDE).

In the comment block, the sketch contains the information that you need to connect a device serially to program it.

// This sketch turns the Arduino into a AVRISP
// using the following arduino pins:
//
// pin name:    not-mega:         mega(1280 and 2560)
// slave reset: 10:               53
// MOSI:        11:               51
// MISO:        12:               50
// SCK:         13:               52

It also gives you some other information so that you can display the progress of the sketch load from the Arduino.

// Put an LED (with resistor) on the following pins:
// 9: Heartbeat   - shows the programmer is running
// 8: Error       - Lights up if something goes wrong (use red if that makes sense)
// 7: Programming - In communication with the slave

In addition to the connections from the Arduino to the ATTiny, it really does make sense to add in a couple of LED and resistors to show that the communication between the two is happening and the real time results. I for one am going to go back to my simple ISP PCB design and add in these LED. This is really something that I should have been doing all along.

When the sketch is loaded onto your Arduino, the next step is to connect your ATTiny85. I have simplified the connection diagram here.

Connect the ATTiny85 to your Arduino UNO according to the diagram and then connect the LED to the Arduino for real time monitoring of the UNO.

Load the blink sketch into the IDE and change the Board (Tools > Board > ATtiny85 with 1 MHz clock).

The Programmer should be Arduino as ISP (Tools > Programmer > Arduino as ISP), so change that too.

The example Blink sketch has pin 13 configured for the LED. There isn’t a pin 13 on  the ATTiny85, so you will need to change it to something else. For example, Pin 5 on the ATTiny85 maps to PB0, change the sketch to use PB0 instead:

// Pin 13 has an LED connected on most Arduino boards.
// give it a name:
int led = 0;

Save the sketch (File > Save) and give it a filename that indicates that it is for ATTiny85.

At this point, you could connect an LED to pin 5 of the ATTiny85. Connect the long leg (the Anode) of the LED to pin 5 and then the short leg (Cathode) to a resistor, then the other end of the resistor to pin 4 of the ATTiny85 (Ground).

So far, we have programmed the Arduino UNO as an ISP and connected the ATTiny85 to our ISP. We have also connected the load to the ATTiny85 so that when we’re done, the LED will blink.

Right … upload the sketch (File > Upload Using Programmer or Control-Shift-U). You should see the LED on pin 9 and 7 of the Arduino flashing and then … the LED attached to pin 5 (PB0) of the ATTiny85 will start blinking.

You can expect to get the avrdude error that everyone tells you is OK – “avrdude: please define PAGEL and BS2 signals in the configuration file for part ATtiny85”. At this stage, that kinda means that it all went OK and your sketch is loaded … the proof should be that the LED is blinking on Pin 5 (PB0).

Job Done.

The ArduinoISP sketch handles the reset function of the Arduino, so there is no need to connect a resistor or capacitor across the Arduino RESET pin.

I plan to return to the avrdude error, I’m sure that this is just a configuration issue with boards.txt, but we’ll see.

Hopefully, you will find this article and follow it rather than the plethora of other articles that were probably right for previous versions of IDE/Arduino. Good luck, and watch out for those hungry, hungry hippos.

Making Cables – Part 4 – Dupont Male to 2 Female

Now that I’ve gone through the first two articles (9V Snap and USB Powered) I don’t think that there is much that I can add to the conversation, really. Follow the directions in the 9V Snap article for preparing the multi-strand wire and connector directions. Remembering that you need to use Male DuPont connectors for the supply end of the cable.

There are no differences in the way that the DuPont connectors are soldered, nor are there any differences in the way that the 2 Pin Housing is used.

The main thing here is that I have a single wire splitting into 2 wires  at the junction point and then shrink tube goes over the join.

At the end of the wire where there are two black and two red lines, these get a Female (4 in total) connector. At the other end of the cable, solder in two Male connectors. Once again, slip the shrink tube over the lines and then slide one red and one black line into the housing so that you end up with a single 2 pin block at the male end and two 2 pin blocks at the male end.

When connecting the double wire to the single wire, I first soldered the two red wires together in a “V” configuration and then wound the single red wire around the double to make the “Y” connection. And then the same for the black wires. The shrink tube then slides over the join so that there aren’t any exposed wires anywhere. Making use of the Third Hand tool to hold the wires while I soldered them together was very useful.

It really is as simple as that.

You can use your multimeter to perform a continuity test by placing one probe on the positive male connector and then touching the other probe onto the exposed loop on the positive female end. Change over to the negative and then test the negative female ends.

With the male end connected to power, you can also run a power check to see if there is any significant voltage drop across the cable, which you might get if the overall cable length is too long. My cable is about 15cm long and I get no appreciable voltage drop.

You could replace the Male DuPont connectors with female connectors if you want, it really depends on your application.

Another project that you could do is making a couple of adaptors. Male to Male, Female to Female so that you can connect to devices that require either male or female connections.

Making Cables – Part 3 – USB Powered

We’re a little bit out of order. I decided to make the USB power cable before the planned second article (2 Pin DuPont Male to 2 x 2 Pin DuPont Female). I’ll get on to that next.

Practically, this project is the same as the 9V Snap project. The only practical difference here is that there is some wire cutting involved in this project that is slightly more complex than the previous article.

As this article builds on the previous one, refer to the previous article for detail on some of the steps that I don’t detail here.

Firstly, I started with an old USB cable for a redundant mobile phone.

This cable has been sitting in my parts/cables box for a while and it’s time to give it a new lease of life.

As you can see, this is a non-standard device end for a USB cable. Hooray for proprietary implementations.

I simply cut the device end away from the cable with some side cutters.

There’s always a moment when you do this that you think to yourself … what have you done? Now I can’t power that … oh yeah, I recycled that phone more than 10 years ago.

Now strip the outer insulating sheath away from the cable core.

Initially, I made this 10mm, but I then went back and stripped another 10mm away so that I had enough exposed wire to strip the internal wires properly.

For this USB cable, there was an inner lining of a metal sheet wrapping the core wires., you can just strip this away by hand.

By convention, there are 4 insulated multi-strand wires inside a USB cable. This cable also had another ground wire of uninsulated multi-strand wire in there. I think that this was a continuous ground from end to end.

The four insulated multi-strand wires are:

• Black – Negative wire for ground connections
• Red – Positive wire – typically 5V
• Green – Negative DATA (DATA-)
• White – Positive DATA (DATA+)

A possible variant is Orange (Positive), White (Negative), Blue (DATA+), Green (DATA-).

As our cable isn’t going to carry data, the Green and White (as well as the uninsulated) wires are cut away.

Try to make this as neat as you can, you don’t want accidental signals interfering with the Positive or Negative lines.

I then stripped away 5mm of insulation from the end of both wires and then tinned the exposed multi-strand leads. These leads are quite thin and are easy to work with.

After the leads were tinned, I then tinned the DuPont Female connector between the end wings as I did in the previous article (9V Snap). Once both the lead ends and the connectors were tinned, I soldered the leads into the connectors.

Then I removed the connectors from the strip and crimped the connectors to the wire for a sturdy connection.

In the previous two pictures, you can see that I have already slipped the shrink tube onto the cable. This is so that I don’t have any problems when it’s time to tidy up the job.

After that, it’s a matter of slipping the connectors into the housing. Remember, I use the arrow on the DuPont housing to indicate positive.

I intend to completely cover the wire on my USB cable, so I won’t be able to refer to the lead colour to tell me which is positive and which is negative.

As you can see, when the shrink tube is shrunk, you cannot tell which lead is which. So the convention of the arrow indicating Positive is very useful.

The last part of this is to connect the cable to power and to power a device to make sure that it’s all hunky-dory. The cable is about 40cm in length, so it should deliver slightly less than 5.1V.

Bazingo, the device is powered. By the way, the USB cable is connected to a USB AC Adaptor, rather than to my computer. If you are unsure of the amount of power that will be drawn by your device … blow up an AC Adaptor, they cost less than a computer. Ideally, you would attach the USB cable to your multimeter to check out how much power it is delivering, just to be sure and because it is easy to do, right? When I tested the cable with the multimeter, it detected a voltage of 5.07V … so there you go, safe to connect to my computer.

Well, as you can see, converting a dead USB cable into a useful 5V power cable is easy and not very time consuming. Overall, this project took about 5 minutes to complete, so don’t expect this to waste your weekend doing it … plan to do other stuff too!

If you wanted to use the cable from a dead mouse … simply cut the mouse away from the cable (it’s just another device end).

Making Cables – Part 2 – 9V Snap Connector

In this article I’m going to attach a DuPont Connector onto a 9V Snap. This is the first, and most simple, of the Making Cables articles that I have planned. All of the skills that you would need to make DuPont Jumper Connectors can be found here … in the later articles, we’re really just going to be re-organising some of the steps, adding new steps and doing some cable preparation.

Here is a picture of my cable crimper.

The crimper has some dies in the jaw for different sized connectors, and for double crimps. At the other end of the crimping tool are some rudimentary wire strippers and cutters. I prefer to use tools that are made for those jobs, but these would do in a pinch. The crimping tool came from Jay Car for $14.95.

The 9V battery snaps that I have, I bought from eBay. I got a job lot of 50 of them for about $6.00, I think … it was a while ago.

Along with this, I’m going to use a 2 Pin DuPont Housing and 2 x Female DuPont Connectors.

You will notice that there is a small arrow on the left-hand side of the 2 pin housing. I use this to indicate the positive (+) for my custom wires, so that’s where you’ll see the red wire going.

The first thing that I do to prepare the 9V snap is to trim the insulating plastic at the end of the wire.

I take a scalpel and I chamfer the end so that I end up with a short cone at the end of my wire. The reason that I do this is that the first couple of DuPont connectors that I made didn’t fit the wire nicely, so the locking piece didn’t lock with the housing and I had to go over the wire and chamfer it while it was attached to the housing. That was a pain in the butt, so I chamfer before I do anything else (much easier). It also makes for a neater end product.

Here are the wires all nicely chamfered.

Next, it’s on to tinning the DuPont Female Connectors. I use a Third Hand tool to hold the connectors firmly before I apply the heat.

Cut two connectors from the strip of connectors and so they are still connected to each other. This makes it easier to handle … another lesson learned. When I did this the first time, I had the cut away from the strip, making them smaller and harder to position.

Tinning the DuPont Female Connector

I then place a blob of solder into the connector: where the wire will go, so that when I solder the wire in, it is much easier.

Solder the wire into the channel

With the wire held in place in the Third Hand, soldering the wire into the connector is quite straight forward. Simply press the iron down onto the wire and apply a little bit more solder to the top and you’re done.

You can see that the chamfered insulation sits nicely in the channel and the wire is held firmly in place with the solder weld.

Now it’s time to take the connected wires away from the strip. The first time I did this, I used a pair of side cutters … don’t do that … it’s messy. Instead, simply hold the connectors between thumb and forefinger and wiggle the strip back and forth, it comes away after about 2 wiggles.

Now that the connectors are removed from the strip, it’s Crimping Time.

I like to give the end wings a quick bite in the crimping tool so that they fit easily into the 22-26 die.

Be careful to only exert a little bit of force here, you’re only closing the end wings about 1mm.

Then it’s into the 22-26 die for a full squeeze. When you are loading the connector into the die, the wire end of the connector should be just inside the die, the sleeve end of the connector should be sitting proud of the die (so that it doesn’t get squeezed).

Close the crimping tool fully and then take the connector out of the die. Just because I like things to be easy, I then give the connector another light squeeze in the 26-28 die so that it is rounded off nicely. This last step isn’t really necessary, but it makes  the connector all nice and neat.

The end result should be that the inner and outer wings of the connector are wrapped snugly around the wire and the sleeve has not collapsed. If the sleeve has collapsed? Well … start again, they are a pain to try to push out again (although you *CAN* do it by hammering a dressmaking pin in to try to open it up again).

Pimped and crimped. You can see that there are two complete loops. One at the business (left) end and one almost halfway along. The one almost halfway along is the piece that locks in to the plastic housing notch to stop the connector from sliding in and out of the housing.

Now you can slide a small piece (say 20mm) of shrink tube over the two connectors. I do this by threading one through first and then threading the second through. If you try to put both through at the same time, it ain’t going to work, unless your shrink tube is too big.

Yeah, a pretty crap picture, but detail isn’t all that important for this one. I’m using a 2.0 diameter shrink tube here.

Now, down to business. I put the red (positive) wire in first. You can see the second loop of the connector through the hole in the side of the housing. Each void has a little tongue in it that will catch at the back of the connectors middle loop, preventing it from coming out. There’s still a little bit of wiggle room there, but not much.

You can see from the picture that the left-hand side of the connector housing has that little arrow I was talking about … this is where my red wire goes.

And now the black wire goes in the same way.

Both are pushed in until the middle loop is completely through, you can then pinch the plastic tongue down and it will sometimes give you a satisfying little “click” indicating that it is engaged properly.

Then it’s just, push the shrinky up to the housing and heat it in place.

I heat the shrink tube by running the hot soldering iron over it in quick even strokes. This seems to be a hell of a lot better than using a cigarette lighter (IMHO).

The final stage is the one where you get to plug it in to something to prove that you have connected it all properly … and give yourself a little “woohoo”.

That’s it. The whole job only took about 10 minutes to complete (with some preparation and photography) and now I have another 9V snap that I can use to power some stuff. I hope you enjoyed this article and that it can give you some kinda benefit.

Making Cables – Part 1

A while ago, I tried to find out the best way to make up my own connector cables with my budget in mind.

My needs, at the time, were to make some 1 pin and 2 pin connectors using DuPont male and female connectors. These were to make up some 9V battery power lines, and later making up some USB power lines.

I found some useful information on the Internet, but the part that was a little mysterious was making DuPont male connectors.

There are a couple of things that you need that will make your life a lot easier if you’re going to do this. First and foremost, you’re going to need a decent pair cable crimping pliers.

I’m going to make up three leads.

1. 9V Battery Snap to 2 Pin Female DuPont;
2. 2 Pin DuPont Male to 2 x 2 Pin DuPont Female (split) Lead; and
3. Dead Mouse USB cable to 2 Pin Female DuPont (5.1V).

I’ll treat each of these as separate projects so that you can refer to them more quickly if you need to.

I’ll litter the Internet with photos of each of the steps so that you can follow the projects as easily as possible.

Stuff that I recommend that you have for these projects:

• Scalpel – used for tidying up the wire insulation so that it fits nicely into the pin housing;
• 8 x 2 pin DuPont housing;
• 6 x DuPont Female connectors;
• 2 x DuPont Male connectors;
• DuPont crimp pliers;
• Solder;
• Soldering Iron;
• Red and Black (or whatever combination) jumper wire;
• Shrinky wire insulation;
• Wire Strippers;
• Wire Cutters.

You can usually buy a couple of hundred male, female and 2 pin housings on eBay for a couple of dollars.

Each project only takes a couple of minutes to complete, so you can get a good result pretty quickly and end up with some versatile jumpers and connectors for your projects for a little effort.

So far, I’ve made these up for Arduino projects, simple power connections for solderless breadboard projects, power connectors and links for PCB projects.

I’m going to start the first project tonight, so I’ll post part 2 of this article after I’m done. As I said, I’ll take plenty of photos as I go.

Electrolytic Etcher Etched Instrument Panel

As promised, here is a picture of the completed Electrolytic Etcher

Here are the links to the previous articles that make up this project.

• Musings
• Musings - Part 1
• Musings - Part 2
• Etcher Design
• Etcher Design - Part 1
• Etcher Design - Part 2
• Etcher Design - Part 3
• Etcher Design - Part 4
• Panel Design
• Panel Design- Part 1
• Panel Design - Part 2
• Panel Design - Part 3

I still plan to make a timber box for the etcher and use the brass instrument panel on that. I hope that I can make the box out of some nice species timber, like rosewood or similar, something with a warm red tone.

The etcher seems to work fairly well … maybe I’ll change the power supply to 9V rather than the present 6.8V. That should improve the etch time.

To recap, the etcher is simply a power supply with the positive supply regulated by a 5KΩ potentiometer. The electrical current then passes through the banana plug sockets into the work-piece while it is suspended in a saline solution. This, effectively, oxidises the exposed brass, etching it away. The etcher has a power indicator (LED) and an on/off switch. But it is a very basic circuit (see Musings – Part 2 for the circuit design).

I’ll probably rub some black shoe polish into the panel to improve its appearance. That’s it for the Electrolytic Etcher. If you’ve read this far, thanks for your patience.

Arduino Thinking

This is a new thread under the overarching Electronics thread.

I’ve been thinking about moving into the realms of microprocessors and I’ve had a look at a bunch of websites discussing a myriad of different microprocessor types and platforms.

The attractive thing about the Arduino platform is that it appears to be (more or less) all in one package. The microprocessor, PC interface and programmer all in one convenient package. This is compared with the alternatives of having a separate interface, separate programmer, etc.

One of my core philosophies is that it is more important to make a decision, rather than sweat on making the “right” decision. If you are wrong, then the wrong decision helps to inform your next decision. The complementary idea here is to not get too invested in being right, but, rather, accept that being wrong is part of the path to being right. Besides, it is much better than being paralysed by inaction. Whichever way it pans out, I’m falling down on the Arduino side of the argument.

One of the problems that I’ve had with the Arduino platform is that many of the projects that I’ve seen appear to be simply about plugging your Uno (or Due) into your project directly. That seems OK if all you are doing is making something that is going to be open and exposed. That kinda looks a bit inflexible.

So I read on more … It seems that the Arduino platform (and programming IDE) are open source. That means that I have more flexibility and I don’t have to use the Uno, or indeed any other 3rd party packages. My real limit here is the use of the microprocessor and a handful of parts to make it work (5 volt regulator circuit, 3.3 volt regulator circuit, 16MHz oscillator …). If I buy the base kit, then I have the development/prototyping hardware that I need to get me going. It would only be the supporting circuitry for the microprocessor and the microprocessor itself that I would “consume” in my project. At the moment, it looks like I can get the core chip for about $4.00 on the interweb.

I also found this tutorial on the Arduino website that describes how to eliminate the Arduino breadboard from your project (Arduino to Breadboard). So there are some instructions available for going “commando”.

I should then be able to program the microprocessor and drop it into a project without the Arduino periphery (although, obviously, I still need the supporting circuitry of the microprocessor). That seems to satisfy my basic needs for size and cost.

I will probably buy the basic Arduino kit and do the tutorial solderless projects in the box to give me some confidence in the platform and to learn more about the Arduino.

One of my basic wants is to build a simple circuit that will make a step motor sweep back and forth to drive a model radar dish (like K-9’s ears in Dr Who). I know … sounds simple!

Beetlebot

A while back, I saw a cool little robot project by Jérôme Demers. I first encountered the Beetlebot on the Instructables website. The Beetlebot is a very simple (and cheap) design requiring only a handful of accessible electronics components (2 motors, 2 lever switches a battery clip and some wire).

I won’t bore you with a description of the build since his page (and several others including the Make! site) have done this. It would also appear that Jérôme’s design has made it into a couple of “Science Education” pages, tutorials, demos etcetera.

I present, however, my build of the Beetlebot …

Where Jérôme uses some shrink wire cover to act as the “wheels” of his Beetlebot, I’ve simply used two more wooden beads hot-glued to the shafts of the to motors.

I’ve been collecting the bits and pieces for this bot for a while (I had some of the parts, but I needed to buy a motor, a battery clip and some spade connectors) and I finally got around to building the project.

While I was soldering, I found it difficult to solder in the connecting wires. My old eyes are not what they used to be … I was using my reading glasses and a magnifying glass to be able to see the connections well enough.

I used solid core wire for the connections rather than multi-strand so that the wire “behaved” better while I was soldering … plus I had some leftover pieces from my last project.

The spade connectors had to be cut down so that the antennae didn’t interfere with each other too much when they activated. I simply used my side-cutters and then soldered the straightened paperclip into the socket before crimping.

The build went very well and I didn’t have very much rework to do. The only real hassle was when I was hot-gluing the trundle-wheel paperclip to the battery clip. It didn’t want to work all that well, so I am supporting the glue with some electrical tape. I also used both hot glue and electrical tape to hold the motors onto the brass strip.

Also, the hot glue blob for the passenger side antenna was a bit excessive and interfered with the operation of the antenna … so I did a little scalpel work.

Balance is important with the Beetlebot. Make sure that you follow Jérôme’s instructions about placement of the motors … if they are too far back, the Beetlebot will face-plant a lot.

The antennae come off very easily, the first time I let my Beetlebot free, it scuttled straight under my lounge chair and left one of it’s antennae under there.

All up, this build cost me about $12AUD and I bought all of the electronic components from eBay. The beads came from Spotlight and the paperclips came from my office.

The project took me about 1 ½ hours to complete … maybe I’ll make a carapace for my Beetlebot, but then again, I quite like the way it looks now. I wonder if I can get away with not giving this toy to my darling daughter?

LED Lamp – Part 5

Today, I de-molded the lamp head from the plasticine.

There was some cleaning up to do as some of the resin leaked through the CD and made a mess on the under-side of the lamp. This would be visible, so I wanted to make it look better. It would also make it difficult to attach the disc to a riser. I picked the resin off with a sharp knife and an awl.
The cast wasn’t 100% successful as the mold was not sitting flat in the ice-cream container. The disc is about 13mm on one end and 10mm at the other side … meh.
Then … I connected it to the USB power supply (5.1V) and it looks pretty snazzy.

It throws a decent amount of light too.
With the disc turned over, so that the LED are facing downward, it looks pretty good too. The clear CD acts as a bit of a light-pipe, the cast blue light is pretty satisfying and the light coming through the resin looks nice too.

I need to figure out how to attach it to a riser and stand. I was originally thinking of casting a riser using the resin with the wires passing through the middle of the cast. That would involve pouring half of the mold, letting it set a little, laying a tube through the centre of the riser and then filling the mold with resin. I should end up with a riser that has a void in the middle where I can pass the wires through. Then I was thinking of making a base with a switch in it that would hold the disc and riser.
An alternative idea is to affix a clip onto the disc so that the light could be clipped on to a shelf over the bed. For that I’d need to make a small switch enclosure.
I dunno what to do … but I’m thinking about it.

LED Lamp – Part 4

The next thing to do is to invest the circuitry in some resin. I’m using Barnes Easy Cast Clear with a mixture of red and white dye and some glitter to add some pink glittery specialness for my daughter (the lamp is for my daughters bedroom).
First, I made a mold using plasticine.

I redid the plasticine base, pushing the LED lights through the CD and into the plasticine. That way, the LED plug up the holes in the CD and there shouldn’t be too much leaking underneath the disc.
The plasticine was rolled out into a couple of strips that were then wrapped around the CD to give me a vessel to pour the resin into. I made sure that I sealed the seams in the plasticine so that the resin doesn’t leak there either. The two wires (positive and negative) that power the circuit were cut in through the plasticine wall and sealed up.
I made up 100ml of 2 part resin. In the first 50ml, I added the white and red dyes and the glitter. The colours and glitter were added here so that I could mix them in without worrying about the pot-life of the mixed resin.
I put the plasticine reservoir into a plastic ice-cream tub to make sure that any spills or mishaps were contained.
When I had the colour mixed thoroughly, I then added 50ml of the resin part-B and poured it into the plasticine reservoir.

The mixture is curing in the mold.
You can see some of the glitter.

The resin is about 15mm thick and should cure to an almost opaque pink.. I’m not sure how much of the glitter will be visible, I’m hoping that the light from the LED will illuminate the resin disc.
Well … here’s hoping. The MSDS for the resin says that it is cured in @1 hour and takes about 7 days to fully cure (unless you want to bake it in the oven … not practical here, I’m afraid).