/candle

Candle Animation for RGB LED on NodeMCU

Primary LanguageC++

#Fire 3 LED RGB Candles with a ESP8266WiFi

Demo flares

Last Christmas i bought a triplet of 3 Led candle with a cheap remote. So, why not include them in my (Homematic) home automation?

Just switching them on or off did not do the job - on "power on" they came back with some strange color.

So, some more serious surgery was needed. I removed the controller and replaced it by a NodeMCU.

On Data sheet the device has plenty of PWM enabled.

So how to animate a candle? Search found me this pretty nice example of a neo candle.

I wasn't aware of multi threading on ESP - so how to let 3 candles flicker independently?

In this sketch i tried to turn the algorithm of flickering inside out :-). It gets pretty unreadable, however, for my it produces a fairly nice candle simulation.

steering gets dome per WLAN.

  • /?b=0 - off
  • /?b=100 - on
  • /fire?s=60 - fire animation for 10 seconds
  • /flicker?s=10 - flicker 10 seconds
  • /flutter?s=5 - flutter 5 seconds
  • /signal - make some crazy color dance
  • /colour?r=40&g=55b=100 - guess

if you want to copy this - have fun :-)

in my actual implementation i had a Problem: my candles hat common + and seperate -. In order to run them on GPIO's i needed 9 NPN Transistor as describen here

So I created this: PCB ready

PCB placed

Finally the candles on a plate with the extra electronics and the NodeMCU. Image of Candles

*Here candle flare 1 is how normal burn looks like.

*Here candle flare 2 you can see the flickering started per URL. Normally this happens once in a while on a candle.

Michael