Fireflies in Action

Dillon Whitfield snapped these images, which were really fun examples of light painting, with a little help from long exposure.    

Here is another video shows the giant Rubbermaid filled with LED lights collected at the end of the evening.  

Tonight!

See you at 10PM at Prince's Island Park!  Make sure you are ready to play.

Sneak peak here: 

And prepare for a great time!  

come PLAY!

You're invited to Prince's Island Park this evening at 10pm. It's the middle of the week, and you deserve some time to hang out and play in the park... at night.

If you missed Firefly Adventure Club, this is your chance to join in on the LED fun. And if you were with us last Friday and had a good time, we hope you'll come by again for a new adventure. Find us in the darkest spot near the playground, and don't forget to bring your inner child along!

Firefly Adventure Club

Last Friday, we put on our first installation, Firefly Adventure Club, as part of the Choose Yer Own festival.  It was a super busy and very successful night, but before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s start from the beginning.

Claudia and I got there a bit early with our friend Kathryn to set up the maker space as well as the performance space for Covers under a Bridge III (the other Choose Yer Own event sharing our space) under the bridge in Elbow Island Park.  

Ben from Protospace also came early and lent us supplies that were very useful, as did some of the Solarbotics guys.  Despite some curious wanderers, we got set up just in the nick of time to welcome our first visitors at around 9:30 - Bryan , Katherine, Devon, and Claire.  From there, it got pretty busy pretty quickly.  Among our visitors were the amazing people from the Awesome Foundation Calgary as well as our pals from Protospace and Solarbotics, and of course all the Choose Yer Own festival goers.

In case you missed it, here’s what the experience was like:

Starting from the corner of 4th St. and 26th Ave. SW, you were greeted with a trail of LED fireflies in mason jars, leading you halfway across the bridge to a sign and a wooden staircase welcoming you onto Elbow Island and into the adventure.  Walking down the stairs, you entered into a landscape removed from the hustle and bustle of the city.  Just off the stairs, you ducked into the space under the 4th St. bridge, where a bunch of people were hanging out, making fireflies, and having a good time.

Photo: James Best

Photo: Jeff Read

We invited everyone to make firelfies with us and put them up around the park.  We had the option of making simple fireflies with an LED and a battery, which was a easy entry point for all our visitors.  These ended up making up the majority of the installation.

Photo: Dana Codding

Photo: James Best

Our more ambitious visitors had the option of soldering their own simple circuits with microcontrollers and three LEDs that more closely mimicked the true blinking of fireflies.  This second activity was super popular.  Thanks to the Protospace and Solarbotics guys for helping people put these together!

Photo: James Best

Photo: James Best

Photo: Dana Codding

The end result was a pretty magical addition to the park, and made the space feel so much more welcoming!  Below are some photos of the fireflies in the foliage and under the bridge, where rad jams happened as part of Covers under a Bridge III.

Photo: James Best

Photo: Kathryn Swanson

In the end, we estimate that about 150 people made it through the space.  We can’t acknowledge all our amazing and diverse visitors in our short blog post, but here are two people whose stories we’d like to share:

Kate heard our CBC interview, called in the host to find out the name of our blog, came down to help us light up the city, and ended up staying all night!   We’re happy to have spotted her again the next day at some other Choose Yer Own events with more friends.

We met somebody who had a couchsurfer staying with him.  For this guy from Scotland, Firefly Adventure Club was his first experience of Calgary.  Chatting with him, he was very excited that there were people who cared about making their city a better place, and mentioned that this kind of stuff didn’t happen in his hometown.  

The night turned out to be a great opportunity for people from all walks of life to come together as a community and make a small corner of their city a pretty rad place.  Looking forward to the next one!

Photo: Dana Codding

Photo: Dana Codding

PS.  If you have photos to share, let us know at collaborativeprojectsyyc@gmail.com

Pre-Firefly Adventure Club

Friday afternoon we decided to make a couple of the firefly kits together to ensure that we had the right tools including butane soldering irons and side cutters to complete each firefly set.  

 Vlad putting a kit together.  We were testing it out on the 'table' we decided we'd use on site - which is an upside down Rubbermaid bin with a piece of plywood on it.

 Vlad soldering on the dip carrier on to the PCB board.  If we can do this, so can anyone else!

Putting the kits together is pretty straight forward.  Start by soldering on the dip carrier, and then the LED lights and the resistor.  After getting those on we cut the excess from the PCB and then we solder on the copper wire that holds the battery in place.

 Each of the the finished kits we soldered together were placed within a mason jar with some wildflowers, which I 'borrowed' from an abandoned house next to my apartment building.

When you pop a firefly into one of these jars, suddenly you've recreated a summer of catching fireflies.

 We learned a lot of valuable lessons throughout this process.  Probably the best lesson we learned while getting ready on Friday afternoon.  We started sorting materials and we divided roughly 800 lithium ion cell batteries between 6 Tupperware containers.  This was a TERRIBLE idea, since five seconds later all of the batteries were boiling hot, and we quickly had to place each battery back in their package from Digi-Key.  Good times...we also learned that if something is packaged in a weird way from an electronics store, it is probably for a good reason (i.e. to avoid short circuiting all the batteries).  Lesson learned.

Total 'noob' mistake.  (We can hear you laughing at us from the Interwebs).  

All packed up and ready to head out.  We had electrical tape, LED lights and other back up materials ready to go.  We also have some pals bringing us a power supply, which is really going to help out the soldering station.  Radness!

See You Tonight!

We hope to see you guys out tonight to make LED fireflies!  Starting at 4th St. S.W. and 26th Ave. S.W. you will find a trail of mason jars that will take you to our location.  Then there will be 800 LEDs for you to help us put up, and we'll have electronic kits for those who want to give them a try too!

Follow these mason jars!

Find this sign!

Tonight is going to be magical!

Thursday Firefly Prep Work

We spend most of Thursday getting organized.  This included a visit to the Firefly Adventure Club site and a visit to do some monkey work at Solarbotics (programming chips, cutting wire etc - which was actually super fun!)

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The site we've scoped out is right next to Elbow River, and has some really beautiful natural pools.  

There are paths throughout the site, and they are actually quite inviting in the daytime.  But at night, I probably wouldn't venture in there on my own...  We're hoping the LED lights will encourage folks to enter into this space while exploring the LED firefly landscape.  

After talking to a couple of the organizers for the Choose Yer Own Festival we decided it would be great if we installed LED fireflies in one of the two under bridge areas.  This way we have one bridge arch for building and another bridge arch for a secret surprise, that will now be filled with LED fireflies (more details later).  

This is the staircase folks will have to come down to find the site.  Luckily, it's not too muddy down there.  

With our Digi-Key order of resistors and chips arriving, we headed down to Solarbotics.  Jeremie had completed the programming for the chips, and Vlad and I were going to help assemble the kits ourselves (to lower costs).   

Check out the PCBs!  So great!  And as we mentioned earlier, it even has the name of our three part project: Illuminated Landscapes.  We learned a lot about PCBs after working on this project.  

 Here are the components that went in each kit that we developed.  Three LED lights, in either green or amber.  A PCB board, a chip, a dip carrier (this way we can remove the chip and reprogram it for future projects), a resistor, and two pieces of copper wire.  We were so excited to see the final results, and we were even more excited to know that we had 50 kits that folks could solder together on site on Friday.

Vlad and I putting the kits together.  Surrounded by boxes.  We finished putting all the kits together and we went down to the site to test some of the LED lights in dark.  

 So this photo was taken with an iPhone, so nothing too impressive, but the site looks great with LED lights all over.  We found the easiest and most plant friendly installation method is using floral wire to wrap around branches and twigs.  We still have a lot more to organize, and we can't wait to watch this space come alive on Friday.   We really want people to feel at easy and to create a space for hanging out and making electronics...a true Do-It-Yourself -Under-A-Bridge community.