Planet Arduino

Keith of “Keith’s Test Garage” wanted an LED candle. While somewhat realistic flicking units are easy to find, he was in search of something much more like the actual thing, and after several years of work has come up with a rather amazing replica.

The device’s wax-embedded glass enclosure houses an Arduino, along with a series of six  RGBW LEDs inside that randomly flicker away to simulate a flame. This effect is triggered via a real match, which is sensed by an IR module. To stop the effect, one literally blows out the candle through a microphone input that picks up on this action. 

Most impressively however, upon putting out the faux flame, a length of resistive wire heats up glycerin and smelling oil on a wick, producing a puff of smoke to end the light performance.

We’d seen it done with buttons, switches, gestures, capacitive touch, and IR remote, but never like this. [electron_plumber] made an LED that can be blown out like a candle, and amazingly it requires no added sensors. The project uses an Arduino to demonstrate turning a tiny LED on and off in response to being blown on, and the only components are the LED and a resistor.

How is this done? [electron_plumber] uses an interesting property of diodes (which are the “D” in LED) to use the LED itself as a temperature sensor. A diode’s voltage drop depends on two things: the current that is being driven through the diode, and the temperature. If the current is held constant, then the forward voltage drop changes reliably in response to temperature. Turning the LED on warms it up and blowing on it cools it off, causing measurable changes in the voltage drop across the device. The change isn’t much — only a handful of millivolts — but the effect is consistent and can be measured. This is a principle [Elliot Williams] recently covered in depth: using diodes as temperature sensors.

It’s a clever demo with a two important details to make it work. The first is the LED itself; [electron_plumber] uses a tiny 0402 LED that is mounted on two wires in order to maximize the temperature change caused by blowing on it. The second is the method for detecting changes of only a few millivolts more reliably. By oversampling the Arduino’s ADC, an effectively higher resolution is obtained without adding any hardware or altering the voltage reference. Instead of reading the ADC once, the code reads the ADC 256 times and sums the readings. By working with the larger number, cumulative changes that would not register reliably on a single read can be captured and acted upon. More details are available from [electron_plumber]’s GitHub repository for LEDs as Sensors.

Embedded below is a video that is as wonderful as it is brief. It demonstrates the project in action, takes a “show, don’t tell” approach, and is no longer than it needs to be.

In the past we have seen LEDs that can be blown out like candles in different ways; one used a microphone to detect blowing while another used a thermistor to detect the temperature change from blowing. [electron_plumber]’s project is notable not only for using no added parts, but also for being documented in a way that just about anyone can get up and running, and that’s something we always like to see.