The miniature Christmas village is a tradition in many families — a tiny idyllic world filled happy people, shops, and of course, snow. It’s common to see various miniature buildings for sale around the holidays just for this purpose, and since LEDs are small and cheap, they’ll almost always have some switch on the bottom to light up the windows.
This year, [Braden Sunwold] and his wife started their own village with an eye towards making it a family tradition. But to his surprise, the scale lamp posts they bought to dot along their snowy main street were hollow and didn’t actually light up. Seeing it was up to him to save Christmas, [Braden] got to work adding LEDs to the otherwise inert lamps.
Now in a pinch, this project could have been done with nothing more than some coin cells and a suitably sized LED. But seeing as the lamp posts were clearly designed in the Victorian style, [Braden] felt they should softly flicker to mimic a burning gas flame. Blinking would be way too harsh, and in his own words, look more like a Halloween decoration.
This could have been an excuse to drag out a microcontroller. But instead, [Braden] did as any good little Hackaday reader should do, and called on Old Saint 555 to save Christmas. After doing some research, he determined that a trio of 555s rigged as relaxation oscillators could be used to produce quasi-random triangle waves. When fed into a transistor controlling the LED, the result would be a random flickering instead of a more aggressive strobe effect. It took a little tweaking of values, but eventually he got it locked down and sent away to have custom PCBs made of the circuit.
With the flicker driver done, the rest of the project was pretty simple. Since the lamp posts were already hollow, feeding the LEDs up into them was easy enough. The electronics went into a 3D printed base, and we particularly liked the magnetic connectors [Braden] used so that the lamps could easily be taken off the base when it was time to pack the village away.
We can’t wait to see what new tricks [Braden] uses to bring the village alive for Christmas 2025. Perhaps the building lighting could do with a bit of automation?
My thoughts went to the flickering code used by many game lights. Is it ironic that I should suggest this could be even better (or at least, nerdier) if a microcontroller was used?
https://web.archive.org/web/20240417220249/https://www.pcgamer.com/half-life-alyxs-lights-flicker-just-like-they-did-in-quake-almost-25-years-later/
Are you saying he could have used an Arduino?
Interestingly, street lights like these used gas mostly, which (unless disturbed by wind or varying gas pressures) produced a very stable flame. Even oil lamps produce a stable flame.
It does provide an interesting dynamic to the scene though, so nice hack!
Gas street light do not flicker like a flame.
The light is very steady (and rather pleasing), being emitted from a heated gas mantle. The only variation is caused by variations in gas pressure, or wind. The former is minor and slowly varying, and with a competently designed luminaire the latter only happens in very strong winds.
My local city had one (possibly two) still operating in this millennium. Although the luminaire remains, it now contains an electric light.
This is cute. My only criticism is the use of LEDs.
Christmas lights should be incandescent lamps, not cold/sterile LEDs.
On model making, miniature incandescent lamps have a long history.
The dollhouse lamps had been produced for ages, too.
They can’t be all used up, can they?
They’re called “grain of wheat” lamps (or bulbs). I’d be surprised if they were no longer being manufactured.
Grain of wheat lamps are pretty hard to find in lots of size/voltage/current combos these days, I had to search really hard to find some for an old radio and the quality/lifespan of the ones I found was not good.
I ended up using warm white LEDs which were cheaper, unlikely to melt stuff and actually quite nice for my application and a really close match to the original ‘feel’
Hello, the lifespan can be significantly extended if you operate the lamps below the nominal voltage.
A volt or half a volt less might make a difference, already. The same applies to tube heaters, I think.
Running the heater on 5V instead of 6,3V can extend its lifespan by a few years.
Great job Braden, both the idea, the execution and the final result !
…and using 555.
(even the video is pleasant and short)
I wish the various Christmas Village makers would have designed to model railroad scales (N, HO, O, etc.)