Here’s an amazing AVR project! Thanks for sending this in Kayobi!
The inspiration for this project comes from having never lived in an area where fireflies were common and being deeply fascinated whenever I encounter them in my travels. The flash patterns have been digitized from firefly behavioral research data found online and were modeled in Mathematica so that variations of speed and intensity could be generated. The final output was transformed by a lightness function and written into header files as 8-bit PWM data.
The software is written in avr-gcc C and source code is provided along with a pre-compiled .hex for convenience. The code has been significantly optimized for efficiency and to minimize power consumption. Crude runtime estimates predict a 600mAh 3V CR2450 battery should last in excess of 3 months — likely *way* in excess of 3 months as my last calculations were based on some rather outdated assumptions and I haven’t yet gotten around to re-running them.
This project involves a fair amount of surface-mount level soldering. However the circuit design is trivial and the fact that we’re able to use an off-the-shelf SMD prototyping board rather than having a custom PCB made greatly saves on cost. It would be very simple to create a non-surface mount version using the PDIP version of the ATTiny45 and through-hole LED’s. The cost of the electronic components comes in at around $10-$15 (after shipping) or so and assembly time is on the order of 2 hours. – Link
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