[anatta]

I grew up in Illinois and live in Los Angeles now, so I miss fireflies badly.

Would you be willing to give up the complexity of the original organism for the function you enjoy? Basically they hover there and emit a soft pulse. To get this functionality we might not need all of the extra crap in firefly anatomy, just a rough approximation.

"All we need" is to create some hovering device (a tiny helicopter) affixed to a tiny LED with an oscillating dimmer. We can make a big one first affixed to a wire and then start miniaturizing it.

If you want to try this out I'm down to help out. I miss fireflies so bad :/ Side note: I know jack shit about robotics but this sounds like a fun way to learn.

[rick_2047]

Umm... Just a thought. Why not use those tiny uC for that. You can get pwm to dim LED (and that too randomly). The only problem is that every motor I can think of, which would enable it to fly would make it to heavy (or I have all the principle of mechanics wrong).