What's driving those electronic candles?

Question

The other night at a restaurant I became fascinated watching one of those flickering white LED electronic "candle inserts" because I couldn't sense a regular pattern to the flicker rate changes.

It would flicker rather regularly for a while at a rate of about once a second then occasionally change to a more rapid flicker rate for a bit and then go back to the slower flicker rate.

The times it spent in the two different flicker rates didn't seem to be very regular.

It reminded me somewhat of a neon lamp near the end of its life.

Anyone know what sort of circuitry is employed in those gadgets? I rather doubt that it's based on a random number generator?

Thanks, Guys,

Jeff

JeffM · Accepted Answer

See what happens when you don't read the group for a week?

hamilton · Answer

Why don't you think it's a random number generator ??

I did something very similar last year with a three color LCD and a PIC10F206.

Wrote the whole thing in C.

I used a 32 bit RNG I found on-line written in C as well.

The PIC10F206 has only 512 bytes of flash and 24 bytes of ram.

Had room to spare.

A weekend of coding and building.

It cost $0.49 for the cpu, 3 SMD resisters, and the 3-color LED $1.00 and 2-LR44 1.5volt batterys $1.00.

Heat shrink tubing over it, it lasted for 4 weeks. Battery got to low for the LEDs but the cpu was still running.

Just imagine a 4-bit cpu under the blob and a single white LED.

hamilton

jeff_wisnia · Answer

I'm probably just showing my age...As a guy who went to college in the vacuum tube days and retired from engineering activities a dozen years ago it's getting harder for me to adjust to just how much circuitry one can produce for pennies these days.

Jeff

Paul Hovnanian P.E. · Answer

The throbbing in my skull seems to recede somewhat. ;-)-- Paul Hovnanian     mailto:------------------------------------------------------------------Keep your gnosis out of my business!

legg · Answer

I think it's just the fact that nowadays people will pay for the'garbage out'.RL

What's driving those electronic candles?

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