Synchronizing Fireflies

Step 2 Materials and Tools

For a grid of 5 by 5 fireflies, you need:

• 25 x 1K Ohm resistor
• 25 x 100 Ohm resistor
• 25 x LDR (Light Dependent Resistor), e.g. M9960
• 25 x LED, 1.7V, 20mA (reg, green, blue, what ever you like)
• 25 x ATtiny13, 1KB flash RAM, 64 Bytes RAM, 64 Bytes EEPROM
• 25 x sockets
• prototyping board
• wire

The cost for one firefly should be about 1.50 Euro if you get some rabate when ordering in larger numbers.

The sockets are only neccessary, if your programs are buggy. If you feel confident with your development skills, you can spare them. ;-)

You can surely replace the ATtiny chip with any other microcontroller as PIC, PICAXE or BasicStamp to name a few. Just take the smallest and cheapest you can get. I go with Atmel as I had the programmer already and my first project with a ATtiny13 worked just fine.

Tools

• Soldering iron
• Solder wire
• Breadboard
• AVR programmer
• 5V Power supply or
• 4 AA rechargeables

Software

• WinAVR