The Firefly diorama is a wonderful little project that combines creativity and a little bit of electronics to make a miniature world with real blinking lights as fireflies. There are many creative ways you can do this and in this project I use some basic supplies like 5 LED's and four "AA" batteries. This project, if you know a bit about electronics will take you two or three hours to complete. I have just created the shoebox diorama with the fireflies and left the inside blank. This would be perfect for a child to draw, color and cutout little figures and insert. Things like unicorns, trees or even some children with butterfly nets trying to catch fireflies!

The Firefly Diorama

View the Quicktime Movie

About This Diorama

I got an email from a visitor to this site who was looking for advice on how to make a nice Firefly Diorama and I thought to myself "What a wonderful idea"! Because I could use some tiny blinking LED's as fireflies. It takes a bit of electronics skill to do this project but it comes out really wonderful.

LED for Diorama LED's are tiny Light Emitting Diodes. This is a picture of one of the LED's I used for this project. It is rather small but it really emits a strong light. This is exactly what is used on many electronic devices like tv's, and stereo's. If you have an electronic device that has a little red, yellow, green or other color light on it that is an LED. The type I used for this diorama is a blinking style. If you apply to it the voltage from a battery it will automatically blink and in a random pattern so all the LED's (fireflies) I have in my diorama blink randomly which makes it really nice.

About the Electronics and the Wiring

Parts List for this Shoebox Diorama Project

1 Shoebox
4 AA batteries
1 battery holder (From Radio Shack)
5 LED's
About 10 feet of thin wire similar to telephone wire. Approximately 24 gauge if you know wires and electronics. 5 feet of red and 5 feet of black I used telephone wire, stripped off the sheating and used the black and red wires inside it.
5 resistors (1 for each led) and the value can be almost anything from 5 ohms to probably 100 ohms or more, I used resistors with a 5 ohm value.
a little switch to turn the fireflies on and off (I used a pushbutton so it is only on as long as you push the button down.

About the resistors and the LED's

LED's are rather sensitive to the current that flows through them and if you connect a battery directly to them you will ruin them. So you really need to attach resistors to each one in order to keep them controlled and operating.

If you are going to do this project I recommend you get extra LED's and a few different value resistors so you can experiment a bit before you actually wire them into your shoebox diorama.

The Wiring Diagram

About the wiring for the diorama- It is pretty straight forward with a battery pack, a pushbutton, LED, resistor and some wires.

Important thing to note is that the LED is very sensitive to polarity. The LONG LEAD on the LED is the Positive (+) and must be hooked up to the positive of the battery pack. If you hook this up backwards it will ruin the LED. This is why I used red and black wires. All the red wires are the positive wires.

Once you have all the wiring done you just have to install everything. I poked small holes in the back of the shoebox and inserted the LED's

Then I used electrical tape over everything to cover the wiring. This image shows the wiring before the tape covering.

Diorama Battery Pack

This is the battery pack for the diorama. I bought it at Radio Shack for two dollars. I put four "AA" Batteries in it. Then tied it to the side of the shoebox diorama.

button for the diorama