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Welcome to the Firefly Cap wiki!

The Firefly Cap is an open source electronics kit for building a jar of fireflies or powering your own device with indoor photovoltaic energy harvesting.

This wiki is being developed to contain technical documentation for the project. If you are interested in using the Firefly Cap as a power supply for your own device or if you want to modify the Firefly Cap, look for information here or in the source repository.

If you simply want to build a jar of fireflies with your Firefly Cap, you only need the instructions at http://greatscottgadgets.com/fireflycap/.

Hardware Highlights

The Firefly Cap is based on four major components:

• photovoltaic panel: Sanyo AM-1454
• supercapacitor: Nesscap ESHSR-0003
• boost regulator: ON Semiconductor NCP1400
• microcontroller: Texas Instruments MSP430G2452

Project Status

The Firefly Cap project is nearing initial release. A prototype consisting of the above components has been tested, and basic firmware implementing firefly simulation is complete. The hardware revision in the repository also includes some untested circuitry to control startup and shutdown of the boost regulator (for example, automatically turning on when the light level is low).

Documentation

• Project Home and jar of fireflies assembly instructions
• Schematic Diagram (PDF)
• Theory of Operation
• Programming the MSP430