FireFly Ornament 2010

$17.00

SiliconFarmers's Firefly products are simple kits you solder together that blink LEDs.

Why build a FireFly?

Helps you to learn basic electronic construction.

Gain experience with microcontrollers

Use as a platform to learn micro controller programming

You get something cool that you can tie to your things so you can locate them at night, wear as jewlery, etc...

To get you started the FireFly's come with all of the parts and instructions and a pre-programmed Atmel ATtiny processors that controls the LEDs.

This particular kit was designed to be a Christmas ornament. It has a round, bright red PCB and four each of red and green LEDs. Hang it on the tree or attach it to your Santa hat. Controlled by an energy efficient ATtiny24v, and using short blinks of the LEDs, it should last for weeks or even months before the CR2032 battery needs replaced. There is a photo-transistor that will suspend blinking while in bright light, and an on/off switch so you can save battery power when your ornament is not in use.

The ATtiny24v comes pre-programmed to randomly blink the eight LEDs. If you have an ISP programmer, you can re-program the ornament to blink in whatever pattern you like. We've made our code open source so you can use it to get started with your own version. SiliconFarmers will be publishing more on programming the ATtiny microcontroller soon.

The FireFly mother board is a single disk kit that contains all of the microcontroller smarts that blink the LED's.