Regular candles can be awfully boring at times. They can only produce one color and the flicker is so… predictable. They can’t even be controlled by an infrared remote control, not to mention the obvious fire hazard. Now, however, [Jose] has come up with an LED candle that solves all of these problems. (Original link to the project in Spanish.)
The heart of the project is an Arduino Pro Mini, which is especially suited for this project because of its size. [Jose] put the small form-factor microcontroller in the base of a homemade wax enclosure and wired it to a Neopixel WS2812b LED strip. The strip can produce any color, and has some programmed patterns including flicker, fade, rainbow, and fire.
The artificial candle is controlled with an infrared remote control, and all of the code for the project is available on the project site if you want to build your own. [Jose] has been featured here before for his innovative Arduino-driven RGB lighting projects, and this is another great project which builds on that theme!
“They can’t even be controlled by an infrared remote control.”
Yes they can! You just haven’t tried a strong enough laser yet.
The flickering of a candle is a great example of chaos in action, subtle variations airflow etc.
A computer routine is just that. Computer run light shows are usually so robotic with a constant speed of the execution.
I think the commercial ones are so predictable because they need to be cheap, so the controller is probably very simple, not even a MCU.
You could simulate lots of things with proper code.
I made a mood light once and was using a LFSR for pseudo random numbers. I started to learn the starting sequence which was bothering me. So every couple of seconds I would save the LFSR to eeprom and then start from there. Problem solved.
so actually it is a expensive version of this: http://www.ledzbuy.nl/product/88/baleno-led-kaars-rainbow-25-1137-7.html but its nice to do :)