Thread: Self lighting candles?

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I am planning a dark room with about 2 dozen LED candles mounted on the walls. I want them to activate as someone enters the room, which I have set up; however, what I would like to do is set them up so that they light up consecutively with a 2 second delay between each one. Without getting into higher end electronic controllers / DMX etc, is there a way to do this in how I have them wired together?

Originally Posted by WitchDr13

I am planning a dark room with about 2 dozen LED candles mounted on the walls. I want them to activate as someone enters the room, which I have set up; however, what I would like to do is set them up so that they light up consecutively with a 2 second delay between each one. Without getting into higher end electronic controllers / DMX etc, is there a way to do this in how I have them wired together?

You are in a hard place there. The time thing is where you are going to have trouble. One way or another there has to be a mechanism that does that. It could be mechanical or electronic. The mechanical would be difficult but would be cheap..., depending on what you have laying around.

You are also going to have to have a trigger as well.

Realistically electronic is the only real way to go. Also you led candles have to be wired and not battery operated or at least the on/off switch has to have a long wire. This is more complex than you think.

I have been thinking about making this for lighting up a staircase. Each step is lighted with an LED but they do not come on all at once. I would have to look at this but I am sure you could change a component to adjust the delay between each "Step" which could be a candle. Just thought you might like to take a look at it as it is a DIY.
http://www.thekanes.org/projects/aut...-stairs-howto/

Completely possible and not difficult if you have a little bit of an electronics background.

You can use a 555 timer to delay the on of a candle and daisy chain these circuits so the output leads to the input of another one.

Here is a website that has a calculator and the basic circuit for this:

http://clarkson-uk.com/555-timer/operation/frames3.html


I don't assume everyone has an electronics background, was this something you would want to diy or is this something you would rather just buy?

Distorted Designs: The only reason I do not want to get into controllers like the DMX or picaboo stuff is cost; I do plan on expanding into those but want a stronger electronics experience first.

Nightlite13: Thanks for the link! That's awesome, and while I understand the concpet I fear that kind of work is beyond me at the moment.

I have a limited understanding of electronics; but want to learn to build my own boards, circuits, et cetera. I thought this was possible with a delay but hear conflicting responses from people that I know that do have an electronics background, much like the conflicting responses here. I really do not want to buy anything, I want to learn how to make everything so that I can fix everything, as much as possible.

[QUOTE=Nightlite13: Thanks for the link! That's awesome, and while I understand the concpet I fear that kind of work is beyond me at the moment.[/QUOTE]

Well, If the delay between each was not critical then it would be easy: You could just get a cheap motion sensor and screw in a light socket to plug converter (you could also just wire an electrical outlet to the output of the sensor) and then plug in a wall-wart type of power supply that was the appropriate voltage and wire that to all the candles instead of the batteries. Leave all the candles on by their switch and have the wire attached inside the battery compartment. You could use very small gauge wire. Solid wire like phone wire would work nicely or Ethernet wire and simply peel off a pair as you go. It would run 4 candles (4 pair) or you could use one wire as a common and use the other 7 wires to run 7 candles on one cable. I know you want the delay and I can picture how cool it would be but maybe if you had 2 motion sensors aimed so that half the room lights and as the person walks farther into the room the second half comes on - just a thought. This would be pretty easy and not too expensive compared to a fancy controller anyway

Good Luck with it - at least you have plenty of time.
If I find the time to play with anything like the stairs video posted above I'll post it and let you know how hard it was. If I get into it I could probably figure out how to increase the delay.
Let us know if you come up with a solution - this is an interesting idea
Dan

I picked up a few of those LED flickering lights from the dollar store yesterday and took them apart.
To my suprise they have simplified those things even more than the last time I tore one apart.
Now the whole circuit to bink the light is on the LED it's self so that is literally the only part.

The whole thing is running off a 3v Battery and consuming 2.5V with a very low current draw.
I tried to find a data sheet on the blinking LED but haven't come across one just yet to tell you what type of current limiting resistor you should use to run this off of a 5V supply. If I pretend it is a normal LED I would use the closest value to 125 ohms, that should give you the 2.5V drop from 5V to supply the LED and supply 20mA of current for the LED.

But like I said the current seems lower than that so I am not 100% on that and this might be taken care of directly from the circuit inside the blinking LED.

We could always look up the battery inside the LED and see what it's current output is and just use that as our number too.

Oh well, I just wanted to let you know about that. I am going to be working on another project for a few weeks but I will come back to this as it would be a lot of fun to make this work on the cheap.

Let me know if you have any questions or run into any problems.

Nitelites, lostskeleton, thanks so much for the input! This is the first thing I'm going to start working on after finals ...

And thank you for using simple language (at least to me) I understand physics and theory of electricity, but haven't played with since I was 6 and learned that pennies and wall sockets are not good bedfellows.