Flickering LED find

jgoldader · Post by **jgoldader** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:05 pm

Hi all,

While scrounging through the local "Five Below" today, I found flickering tea candle LED lights for $1 each! They were near the incense and lava lamp-style lamps.

These are great for randomly flickering lights (fires, etc.) and at $1 each, how can you go wrong?

Here is a page showing how to hack the lights to run high-powered LEDs; the same principles may work to use blue/green/etc. LEDs, though I haven't yet tried it (but I will... oh yes, I will

):
http://www.johnnyspage.com/otakuFlicker ... kuHack.htm

I'm going to be using these in a 1/48 scale haunted house I'm building for display on Halloween this year

.

Jeff

Kylwell · Post by **Kylwell** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:52 pm

You can also pick them up @ Walgreen, Wal-mart, K-mart.... just about anywhere. Great random flicker.

jgoldader · Post by **jgoldader** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:26 pm

Howdy,

Well, I tore one of the lights apart. A yellow LED was attached via ~1mm leads to a small IC on a tiny PC board. Three button cells were provided, giving, I suppose, 4.5V of power.

I removed the yellow LED (sorta grabbed & twisted with a needlenose pliers) and it came off, leaving a little extra length of lead (pulled out of the LED). I soldered wires onto the leads, and attached a blue LED to those wires. I powered the whole thing off a 9V battery with 1K Ohm resistor (my LED tester).

Result: a flickering blue LED! I'll wire it with a bigger resistor when I set it up for real, the LED was very bright and I don't want to burn anything out. 2K-5K, something like that, should be fine.

Jeff

NNYGamer · Post by **NNYGamer** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 8:50 pm

From what I heard that some use a sound chip to make the flicker so if you hook up a speaker you might hear some tune.