A controller to save battery in the Sylvanian Families fireplace
It originally uses small incandescent lamp and simple slide switch. This leads to battery is completely depleted it 1 day if you have forget to turn it off.
I have changed this small incandecent to 3 ultrabright warm white LEDs and added:
- step-up converter (5V though, the one I had by hand, use 3.3V if you have a choice, for a better efficiency)
- STM8 controller (small STM8S103F3P9 board from Aliexpress)
- 3pcs 100ohm resistors
- peice of bluetack to get rid of white light coming out between the fire and bottom of the fireplace
Here is the layout of components inside the fireplace.
The device runs at high brightness flickering and emulating burning fire for 30 minutes. After this top LED light is dimmed for 1.5 minutes until off. Then both bottom LEDs are dimmed for 15 minutes to constant weak glow, which will then be disabled completely and uC put into halt mode consuming less than 1mA.
There are binary sfp.s19 and option_bytes.hex files in the Release directory, you also can use sft_programmer.stp file to just flash the firmware.
If you wish to generate your own brightness curves - use the Gnuplot: gnuplot -c plot.gp which will create out_candle.dat, then run convert.pl perl script to convert this into pwm_waves.h header file.
There's also candle.gp gnuplot file which can be used to generate smooth splines through points from manual.dat. But it's either too slow to look like a fire or too many points should be added to the file manually.
