flickering candle

2 Articles

Hacked Tea Lights Flicker Just Right

November 30, 2023 by 17 Comments

Flickering LED tea lights are a friendly and safe alternative to having flaming little pots of wax situated around your home, but sometimes the flicker scheme leaves something to be desired.

[Roger Rabbit] found a set of six such rechargeable tea lights with a base and a remote, and replaced the controller with an ATtiny85 for a more realistic flicker. When [Roger] opened up one of the candles, they found an IR sensor for the remote, a driver chip, and of course, an LED. No surprises there.

After desoldering the original controller, [Roger] wired in a socketed ATtiny85 on a piece of perfboard and hooked everything back up.The coolest part of this hack might just be the fact that there’s a perfect little compartment for the new microcontroller. How about that?

The Arduino code for this project is available in the Git repository, and the wonderful instruction manual is available in PDF form. Be sure to check out the brief video after the break.

You like these flickering LED candles? Here’s one you can blow out.

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Candle with flicker led that you blow out

Blowing Out A Candle Flicker LED: The Death Of Flame

January 5, 2017 by 22 Comments

One day there will be no more need for flames. [slider2732] has put yet another nail in the coffin of this most ancient of all technology by making a candle that uses a flicker LED that you blow out. A little more miniaturization and we’ll have them fully integrated into the size of birthday cake candles (Hint hint, hackers!).

You may have seen these candle flicker LEDs.  They have a small chip inside them that modulates the LED’s light to flicker like a candle. We’ve even reported on what [Cpldcpu] found when he reverse engineered them first here and then here.

What [slider2732] did was to buy an electronic candle that used one of the LEDs actually shaped like a flame, and to drill a hole near the ‘flame’. He them embedded a microphone behind the hole. That goes to an LM386 amplifier circuit and from there to an Arduino Pro Mini all powered by a LiPo. As you’d expect, the Arduino code is very simple, just watch the pin from the amplifier and based on an internal variable, turn the LED on or off. We really like how none of the electronics is visible and how you actually have to lean over and blow into the top of the candle to blow it out. You can see this demonstrated in the video below.

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