Learning basic electronics by building fireflies
a64.in
a64.in
Light pollution, and even more: pesticides.
Population of all insects fall dramatically.
"Three-quarters of flying insects in nature reserves across Germany have vanished in 25 years" - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/18/warning-...
Doesn’t seem to happen anymore…
By 20 years ago, they were almost entirely gone.
I applaud the author for wading into analog electronics. Pretty much everyone nowadays would just put a timer on a micro and be done in 2 minutes. No fun in that. There is something to be said about the minimal elegance of purely analog designs, and a special rewarding feeling for wrangling electrons in their native habit rather than their boxed up binary bins.
I think it depends on the ecosystem. It's true much of the "maker" community tends to embrace whatever solution is the cheapest, fastest and easiest to get something working out the door, but on the other hand, the DIY synth community tends to be the opposite (in my experience at least), favoring simple schematics and "back to basics" building, even sometimes going as far as trying to skip any sort of prebuilt ICs.
Transistors were, for some reason, seemingly unknowable to me. But I made a kind of "transistor playground" [1] based around Forrest Mims III book [2] and then enjoyed playing with them.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/dChq4AZ
[2] https://archive.org/details/forrest-mims-basic-semiconductor...
Edit: actually, I had forgotten it was a transistor logic playground for I made for creating logic gates with transistors. Based on another Forrest Mims book: https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims
For £3.50 you can get an ESP32 module with WiFi and Bluetooth (e.g. https://thepihut.com/products/esp32-c3-mini-development-boar...)
(A regular Arduino board might still be the best choice if you're just learning/tinkering though)
At this cost for a hobbyist it's just hard to beat. It can be anything you want it to be in a few lines of code.
I personally write Rust for it, not Arduino C++, but it would work just the same.
I've got dozens of them in my electronics drawers I don't really use anymore since ESP32 dev boards are so cheap and capable for home projects.
Granted, you can almost get a microcontroller for that price…
Kind of mind-blowing. 24mhz 32-bit computer for under a dime.
But you'll learn more about the analog-ish world and not need to deal with SMD if you go the 555 route. And it'll save you power vs the astable monovibrator with NPN transistors.
Make has a really nice little book where they walk you through some simple projects on a breadboard with 555s, transistors, etc. https://www.amazon.com/How-Use-Breadboard-Make-Handbook/dp/1...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population...
Here the ingenious circuit design and debugging to make an electronic firefly is made all the more poignant by the fact that artificial lighting disrupts firefly reproduction and communication,[0][1] meaning that LED light pollution at night is one of the main reasons firefly populations are declining.
[0] https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.4557 [1] https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.220468
I just found it again yesterday at a very old-school electronics shop. The kind of delightful place packed wall-to-wall & floor-to-ceiling with stuff where each category (test equipment, passive & active components, motors, motor drivers, audio, video, hobby-everything) is either super well organized (passive "jellybean" components) or a giant pile of eclectic offerings stretching across 40 years of technological history (test equipment).
I bought it for nostalgia, and I might fix it up or even upgrade it to give to my niece when she's old enough. But looking through it confirmed something I'd long suspected:
1) Things like LRC circuits don't make sense without an oscilloscope. I have one now but REALLY wish I had one as a kid, even a crazy-cheap incredibly low quality one would have been amazing.
2) The book was VERY poorly written, seemed rushed and minimally thoughtful - there was no real explanation of fundamentals that could be used to drive creativity and exploration. I wish I'd had a book which explained concepts better. I didn't start understanding electronics in any interesting way until I took calculus-based electromagnetic physics in college.
Using the kit was mainly fun for me to blow up old-school red LED's. It gave me familiarity with electronics schematic symbols, breadboards, and some very basic tinkering. That young childhood familiarity made me much more comfortable around electrical pursuits throughout my life.
Yes. Especially since oscilloscopes now start at $43 at WalMart.[1] $36 on Amazon. There are $12 oscilloscopes on Alibaba. Bandwidth is low, but plenty for audio, motors, etc.
Here's an electronics kit recommended on Reddit.[2] That plus a cheap scope and you can do most of the basics. All for under $100.
[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Osdhezcn-Pocket-Size-Oscilloscope...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskElectronics/comments/1k06mpz/sho...
I did put together a lot of Radio Shack project-in-a-boxes though.
This class was the hardest class I have ever taken in my life but it really gave me an intuitive understanding of analog electronics that I still have 20 years later.
I don't there there is any quick substitute for just putting in the work. All these posts about AI learning are the same. The magic isn't AI, but the motivation to learn. The AI might help some folks get more excited about the process, though.
And then there is an amazing site with (thousands of ?) electronics hobbyist magazines archived [2]. If you want to start browsing, they often ran series in their issues along the lines of "getting started in electronics". Regardless, some awesome projects in there.
But if you want to go back pre-transistor (ha ha) the U.S. Navy had a great series on learning electronics [3]. Def. analog.
[1] https://archive.org/search?query=Forrest+Mims
[2] https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide....
[3] https://archive.org/details/basic-electronics-volumes-1-5-by...
We've all noticed that certain flies and lures have stopped working, or at least, have significantly reduced efficacy. We think it's because for at least several generations (fish have short lifespans), they haven't been exposed to those insects.
I put up deer fly traps every year and that helps, but this year in particular has been awful for both them and mosquitoes. Luckily for the bugs my sprayer is broken and I haven’t had time to fix it.
I deliberately avoid the place on our property where fireflies are, on the years that I do spray. We really need a better solution.
Just to be clear, if we go outside right now we instantly have multiple deer flies trying to land on us and bite, which is only a distraction for the mosquitoes. Without swatting I’d probably get a mosquito bite a minute midday or maybe 5-10 a minute at 7pm.
You can also try to increase the number of predators. Create habitats for bats, dragonflies, mosquito larva eating fish, etc.
I've found picaridin lotion to be much less annoying than DEET spray but still effective this year.
Our attic was such a good habitat for bats we had to do something about it ;). But we’re also surrounded by woods.
If anyone knows of a hobby-grade circuit design and simulation software (on macos! or online), I'd be so grateful to have it mentioned. I've tried kicad, diylc, fritzing, and a few other options, and nothing really "works". It's like the minds of people who created these are broken in a certain tragic way that just does not yield itself to making useable software.
The holy grail for me would be something that allows to design the electronic, then spatial aspects of circuits -- from testing the functionality, to making the board (and bonus points for stripboard support!)
Theres an interesting article by Mike Engelhardt (author of LTspice) which gives hints on the details of their implementation.
https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/tech...
Imagine trying to simulate something that used water in tubes to implement logic, except it's analog logic and there's resonance and some of the joints start leaking when they exceed a certain pressure and etc.
LT-spice is just a graphical front end to make SPICE easier to use.
Yeah, analog is hard.
Fully agree that your mind has to be a particular type of broken to click with all of these. I love LTspice for its simulation tools, for example the ability to vary a component value over time in a transient simulation, but it is a software that fights you at every turn when you try to learn it.
come again?
It would have to be pretty danged sensitive I guess.
Extra points if the circuit can be rigged up to respond to changes in brightness, so that it doesn’t constantly trigger in daylight….
But then again, fireflies use their lights to attract mates, and I'm thinking now that their phosphorus-based communication might be more complex than just a randomly emitting diode.
I can picture it now... "You're into WHAT?!? Nope, I'm out of here!"
I distinctly remember the first time I hooked up a 555 timer, then it was decade counters, 741 op amps, logic gates and such, then learning the resistor colour codes and blowing up electrolytic capacitors on the bench supplies for fun.
For my 6th form Electronics project I built an 8-bit ADC, parallel to serial converter, then serial back to parallel and an 8-bit DAC as output all from discreet components and logic ICs.
The first half (input stage) was enough for the top grade, but I enjoyed it so much I spent most of my lunch times in the lab building more and more onto it.
I can feel that joy in OPs post.
I later went on to do my degree in Electronic Engineering.
Thanks for that piece of nostalgia and sharing the fun with us with such a wholesome project!
https://hackaday.com/2025/03/19/worlds-smallest-blinky-now-e...
there were fireflies all over in my childhood, we played with them all the time. but I hadn't seen them in decades. Then one summer there there were... in the heart of New York City of all places. Crazy beautiful.
I remember in high school signing up for this electronics stuff. I was just learning what a resistor was and a few engineer kids over the two semesters bought and built an original Apple I kit. Ah, growing up in the silicon valley...