Candle Flicker

Todays candles have been optimized not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, the resulting triplet will start to naturally oscillate. Amazingly, the frequency is rather stable at ~9.9 Hz as it mainly depends on gravity and diameter of the flame. We detect the oscillation with a suspended wire and divide it down to 1 Hz.

Analyzing a battery powered LED tea light with 24h timer functionality. Discovering that it is surprisingly based on a low-cost 8-bit microcontroller integrated into the LED package.

Attempting to build a LED candle with integrated light sensing using the ‘3‑cent MCU’

Can we reverse engineer the flickering pattern of a real candle to improve artificial candle LEDs? Measuring and analyzing the temporal light output of a real candle.

Reverse-engineering the algorithm of a candle flicker LED by statistical analysis of its light output pattern.