5pcs Digispark Kickstarter Attiny85 General Micro USB Development Board for Arduino

Update 10/15/21:After using these as mouse jigglers for a little while I'm sad to report back that I have not been able to get them consistently working. Sometimes it's switching USB ports, and even then they only occaisionally work. The boards still work fine for non-HID tasks. I'd steer clear if you need something to consistently communicate over USB.Original review belowWarning: Programming required! Does not do anything out of the box other than blink!Use case: HID emulator for mouse jiggler.Important note(why 5 stars?): The boards work. Three of the five received were programmed successfully and perform their jiggling job flawlessly. The other two are missing due to my cats. The easiest way to prove the hardware works is just plug it in. My boards came preprogrammed with the blink sketch. Do you see a solid green light and red blinky light on the board? If so the board is fine, and it's a software(or maybe USB on your computer) issue.Caveat emptor: This is not a foolproof process like a programming a standard arduino. If you just want a single mouse jiggler, get an off the shelf product. I wanted to know what was happening under the hood and am suspicious of mystery dongles. A badusb might be easier to program out of the box but I only just got one so the jury is still out on that for me. I ran into several issues with the Digispark clones in this review. Issues described below.Notes:-I used debian and Arduino 1.8.15 to program and was able to get it to work. Some of the issues I encountered may also happen on a windows machine.-I used the standard digistump/digispark GitHub repo to get the board profiles and micronucleus into the Arduino IDE. If you are using Linux and aren't familiar with the OS I'd recommend following one of the 3rd party guides.-Debian specific(probably): Error "Assertion 'res>=4' failed" translates to a permissions issue. In my case that meant the board needed to be added to the dialout group to be programmed. There is a solution online involving creating a digispark.rules file containing a short snippet of board info.-Speaking of permissions: make sure you(the user) also have permissions for the appropriate group(e.g. dialout). When in doubt, eliminate the variable of a cloned Kickstarter board(this product). Plug in a bog standard Arduino uno and try uploading the blink sketch. If it didn't work(and you know it should because you double checked the board settings on the IDE) chances are you don't have the right permissions. Change permissions and keep fiddling with the uno until you can get it to program no issues, then move to the Digispark clone.-The board profile in the IDE is "Digispark(Default - 16.5mhz)" for this particular clone.-The programmer should automatically change to "Micronucleus".-If it didn't auto-change: either the board isn't recognized because of board permissions(see above and note that user permissions shouldn't affect this) or because something just didn't settle in after you added the boards and programmer to the IDE. A good ol' reboot worked for me.-Many troubleshooting posts talk about fiddling with micronucleus. I just used it as is.-Flash erase error 32 was corrected by trying a different USB port. There is one open thread from 3ish years ago where OP posted the same error 32. OP didn't get a solution and didn't bump the thread. I suspect they probably came to the same conclusion I did.-Googling "digispark mouse jiggler" will lead you to the code you want for copy/paste. I'd pick some code that blinks the red led every time it jiggles and disable that afterwards to be more stealthy and tacticool.-If you have the board flashed, and it's blinking you'll know you've done your job with programming.-obvious fact that I still tried to look for: the mouse jiggles an almost invisible amount, assume you can't see it. That's why the LED blinking with movement is useful.-My windows machine still went to lock screen with the jiggler plugged in: try a different USB port. This also happened to me.

I work as a BDC agent at a car dealership and I am on my computer 12 hours a day. It is a very large (300+ stores) chain and they recently implemented a 90 second 'timeout' rule for every computer in all of the stores. When the computer "times out' , I have to log back on to 4 main programs that I use, taking 2-3 minutes to get back in 'synch'-this happens 15-20 times a day.Very frustrating.After reading a few articles and watching a few you-tube videos , I figured I'd give this a whirl. I ordered a 5 pack of this item assuming I'd break a few of them or receive a dud or two while attempting to make a 'jiggler'.Following a guide that I found( search for ATtiny85 jiggler) ,I downloaded Arduino and figured out how to create a 'sketch'. I plugged the first one in to a USB port and hit the 'upload' arrow in Arduino and all I got was 'dinging' noise from my computer and the program 'timed-out'. My computer was not recognizing the device.After watching a few more video's and reading a few more articles , I stumbled on to the solution. It turns out that the USB diver for the ATtiny85 must be loaded onto your computer before Arduino can do it's thing.I installed the driver and plugged in the device...Arduino programmed it in about 10 seconds. I did all 5 units in less than 5 minutes..I brought one to work and plugged it in..no more 'time-outs'.The only gripe that I have with this thing is that there are 2 LED's on the unit that are very bright and constantly 'blink' -- which can draw the attention of a passer-by. I solved this problem by simply wrapping it in black electricians tape.

A little difficult for a beginner to navigate the Arduino IDE software but it's arguably better than Hak5's ducky, and way cheaper. Just wish there was an inconspicuous case/shell for these boards

The issue I had at first was it was not uploading. When uploading, the micro can not be connected. Click upload then plug microcontroller into the USB. A pc driver must be installed first unlike something like uno. Does not use ports either.

Support has been abandoned. Don't make the same mistake I did. Read the reviews and move on

So the company that makes them abandoned the product 8+ years ago. the github to make these work in arduino IDE is useless and does not work. But there is a fix. search github for digistump and look in the reported issues for issue number 143 "this repo is abandonded" by ArminJo. they have one that is working. also an even better one is available at drazzy for the ATTINYCore board manager url. the keyboard and mouse libraries from digistump are a mess and throw all kinds of errors.But these things make awesome undetectable mouse jigglers that the IT department can not detect no matter what they try and its not annoying like the ones that constantly move the mouse. I dared my friends in the IT department to detect one I handed them and none of their software could see or detect it, if you look up "digispark mouse jiggler" on google there is an article on how to make it look like a dell mouse to windows

They have some quirk (some of the I/O pins do double duty, for example), but they work well and the price is right. I use the Arduino IDE to program and upload to them, and it does take a certain amount of setting up to find the right board manager and get them talking to the PC, but once you figure it out it's pretty straightforward.