The latest Gadget Freak, holiday style! –
Give your Christmas lighting a country look and make your Nativity scene more realistic with an electronic flame flicker. This device can be used as a lamp dimmer or a flame flicker simulator, and may be switched on and off with the switch on a lamp. The flicker dynamics may be customized for candle, kerosene (or oil) lamp or campfire. Replacing the controls with fixed resistors yields a version inexpensive enough to build an array of them for independently flickering electric candles.
HOW TO – Make a realistic electronic flame flicker – Link.
6 thoughts on “HOW TO – Make a realistic electronic flame flicker”
Comments are closed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Join Make: Community Today
Flickering fire and smoke is certainly what you will get if you use the 200V recommended rated parts outside the US (on a 240V mains system).
if anyone saved a local copy of this please email me, the articles gone now.
jake at vonslatt dot com
You can also build digital candle-flicker simulators. A couple years ago I wrote one that runs on an AVR, based on the (much more sophisticated) project on Philip Ching’s webpage. An ATmega8 can run a good several candle simulations simultaneously: all you need to do is filter an LFSR’s output with a low-pass filter (running average with the correct weights will do it) and PWM a pin with the result.
(While hunting down that page just now I also found this useful Producing Flicker With Software page.)