Fire crickets
This project was inspired by a walk that I took in Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve in 2021. As we were walking down a path into the valley at sunset, the forest started coming alive with crickets and other little forest creatures in the bushes and the trees. It was very clear that all of the sounds came from individual creatures, and I could hear the sounds shifting relative to me as I walked down the path. This is not a kind of experience I get to have very often, in a world where sound comes from headphones and speakers, and I wanted more people to be able to experience it.
To make this happen, I designed a device that could talk to a network and play sound files, and then made a few dozen of them. The devices also have a single LED that can blink, to imitate a firefly. They can be scattered anywhere that’s reachable by a single wireless network, and they’re controlled by a server that can coordinate their collective behavior. Source for the software and hardware is on GitHub.
Here’s a link to some photos and videos of prototypes.
