This is mostly for my archival purposes.
Archive
I’ve seen a lot of electronic fireflies on the internet. Here, here, and probably others. The theory is simple, just small LED’s charlieplexed with a microcontroller. I wanted to take it a step futher, with a light sensor, solar panel, and more complex firmware.
This is my first microcontroller project from scratch, and I got to learn all sorts of interesting things like SPI programming, Watchdog Timers, Sleep states, and many other things…
I wanted to flash more than just one firefly at a time, so I couldn’t do true PWM with all 12 with an ATtiny85. So I came up with my own way to control varying levels of brightness. Also I wanted a light sensor so the fireflies could come out slowly during the night, and the quickly disappear when the lights come on. The hardware was pretty difficult to solder, involving stripping magnet wire and hand soldering SMD LEDs.
Sorry for the poor pictures, my camera doesn’t do well in low light.
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All the code is located here. You can check it out using svn or just download it directly. I was hoping to use a solar panel to make them self-sufficient, but they required too much power for them to be useful unless they were in direct sunlight.
The parts list and schematic and more info are on my wiki.
I’ve finally moved to Colorado, and I had to leave the big clock behind, and luckily I had finished it:
I finilized the code, installed the clock in my church, and programmed it for there needs. The code is stored here if someone want to see it. If you want to check it out run:
svn co http://dev.xkyle.com/clock
I have a little more technical info on my wiki, but it basically goes like this:
So using this and Openvpn, I can control the clock through the serial interface anywhere in the world, even Colorado! And of course the best part of it all, the church staff can also control it by sending an @reply using twitter!
The clock is almost finished, I’m just sanding the rough edges and putting on the final coat of paint. All schematics and code will be on my wiki when I’m finished.
After this second day of talks and no missle silo, there was this strange influx of women as the sunset approached. Turns out they were not for the camp, they were for the band:
They thought it was cool I guess. Somehow the owner of the silo booked these two events to have them intersect. Why else would 3 bands play in the middle of nowhere?
Afterwards there was free beer, and let me tell you, geeks can party hardy all night long:
That is two people with EL wires suits and a pirate’s mast camp. Below is a zip of all the movies and pictures I collected from this day:
