A Menorah For The 21st Century

For those new and experienced, this time of year is a great chance for enterprising makers to apply their skills to create unique gifts and decorations for family and friends. [Mike Diamond] of What I Made Today built a phone controlled, light-up menorah. It’s a charming way to display some home automation know-how during the holidays.

Expanding on his previous project — a pocket-sized menorah — a Raspberry Pi Zero with a WiFi dongle, some LEDs, wire, and tea lights suffice for the materials, while setting-up Blynk on the Raspberry Pi and a phone to control the lights ties it together after mounting it in an old monitor housing.

[Diamond]’s guide is written with beginners in mind, so this little affair could be adapted to a range of customized ideas within a flexible budget. Assuming you can sneak off with the giftee’s phone to install the app this will make a great surprise. Hanukkah begins on Saturday; if you put your parts order in right now you can definitely complete this in time!

Those not wild about the connection to the phone can certainly build their own microcontroller-based LED menorah. EMSL has a menorah with an awesome PCB design, and Hackaday’s own [Mike Szczys] came up with a compact single-sided design you can etch at home.

[via /r/raspberry_pi]

4 thoughts on “A Menorah For The 21st Century

  1. For frumskies who want to say the blessing according to nearly all opinions some sort of Maglite mini bulb using an incandescent filament for at least one of the ‘candles’ is enough to constitute minimum halachic fire(incandescent heat and light as in blacksmithing metal) and the rest can be LEDs. Even without this would still be great for bot fun and persumi nisim.

  2. I am building an ugly Hannukah sweater. Painted a menorah on it. Using LED strips for candles with an arduino nano controlling which candles are on, “flame” flickering, how they burn down, the candle colors, etc. Little speaker playing a hannukah song. It’s all done but the final assembly in the sweater – hopefully I’ll get it finished today.

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