Mosaic of things that draw life from light: finishing a project

Back in May, I mentioned a project that I was working on, inspired from a line in a book, leading me to hack solar deck lights.

I just want to say that I finally put it all together. I made two candlelight-like motions-sensing solar-charged pieces, and one pice that also had LEDs for blinking like firelflies.

An aside: Fireflies?
A few years back, I made a gizmo that would turn on at dusk and blink a firefly pattern. Alas, it was only a single LED, and a very crumple circuit.

For this latest project, I also wanted to do LEDs flashing, but chose to do six lights, randomly flashing, all to the same firefly pattern.

I will admit that I used ChatGPT to help me figure out the blink patterns and then program it. Alas, I first asked ChatGPT to program in CircuitPython, so I could use my Raspberry Pi PICO. But something wasn’t right and I think I fried two of them. SO I chose to them just do it with an Arduino Nano clone. ChatGPT was kind enough to convert the code (tho, don’t tell it that it did a mediocre job and I had to clean up the code).

In the end, the third part of the project was a candle-light motion-sensing solar-charged piece that also blinked for fireflies.

The other light-driven part
Now that I had the three solar-power parts, I filled up a flowerpot and spread wildflowers around (see image, right).

And waited. Until the flowers grew.

Now I have a pretty flowerpot with flowers that draw life from light and three candle-light electronics that draw life from light (see upper left image for dusk and day views).

Now to send a note to Becky.