[Miroslav Hancar] wasn’t satisfied with abusing just a single component for our Component Abuse Challenge. He decided to abuse a whole assembly, in particular, some LED candles. In this project, LEDs are abused as temperature sensors. When the temperature gets hot enough for long enough, the microcontroller will turn on its LEDs. How? A diode’s […]
It’s officially October, and that means we can start unleashing the Halloween hacks. Take for example this restless skeleton that master automaton maker [Greg Zumwalt] has doomed to spend eternity inside of a useless box. If that wasn’t enough to wake the dead, every time some joker pushes the button, these blinky lights come on. […]
Humans like things that look like other things. A great example are faux LED tea light candles, with a plastic “flame” and flickering orange LED to recreate the effect of their waxy brethren. [gzumwalt] wanted to take the concept a little further, however, and got down to work. The design harvests the orange LED and […]
Over the last few years, LED candles have become increasingly common; and for good reason. From a distance a decent LED candle is a pretty convincing facsimile for the real thing, providing a low flickering glow without that annoying risk of burning your house down. But there’s something to be said for the experience of […]