LED candles are very common these days. It’s easy to see the attraction — there’s no fire danger and they never need to be replaced (just batteries). But there’s such a wide variation in price and quality that it’s hard to know what to purchase. Some store-bought candles flicker very realistically, others just seem to blink. Some use plain white LEDs, some look like real flames. And there’s no way to know how good a candle will look without buying it.
Thankfully, with Adafruit’s Gemma microcontroller and an RGB LED pixel, making your own LED candle only takes a couple of minutes. Because the LED can create any color and the Gemma can control the flickering very precisely, it will look better than any store-bought candle ever could. Because the parts are so cheap, it will cost much less too!
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
