Firefly jar

There are a number of projects out there on the web to make a simulated firefly jar with LEDs and a microcontroller. The first one I was aware of was in this Instructable, and that was the basis for my hardware. There is also this one and this one, as well as a project to make synchronizing fireflies. Since completing this project I’ve also seen yet another.

I made the firefly jar as a Christmas present, and it worked well with the provided code, but I wanted to make the fireflies look realistic, meaning similar to the species we saw in our backyard in the summer (Photinus pyralis, the common Eastern firefly of North America), and exhibit realistic behavior. I initially thought that it would be easy to modify the source code to change the behavior, but I realized that I would have to learn how the AVR hardware is controlled at a low level, and I ended up writing my own software from the ground up, in order to teach myself how it worked and make sure that I understood everything that went into it.

Next: firefly jar hardware