Fireflies, or lightning bugs, one of natures miracles, but not so common in the UK, especially in my garden. In this tutorial I'll show you how to make realistic solar powered fireflies (lightning bugs) for the garden.

The secret to this project is to use individually addressable LEDs, on a copper wire string, combined with a solar cell, charge/boost converter and an Arduino.

Other charge controllers may make this easier as some will cut the power while charging, but we're going to put the Arduino into low power mode anyway.

I'm using the Arduino Pro Mini from Sparkfun, as its really easy to make it use less power (and I have it already), other smaller micros could also be a good alternative.