Cheapest dancing flame teardown

It's a long time since the first (expensive) Luminara style dancing-flame candles first appeared, apparently based on the patented candle effect used in the Disney haunted mansion attraction. Then the Chinese started copying them en-masse as happens, and the price came down to a more realistic level.

This unit is the cheapest I've seen, and worth getting purely for the module or for hacking with a more suitable LED colour. The Chinese manufacturers just don't seem to understand that a candle should have a golden white colour resembling an actual flame. They either fit cold-white LEDs or the classic lurid sodium yellow LEDs that used to be the closest colour before white LEDs had been invented.

In this unit they have used a phosphor based LED, but bizarrely, they've used lurid sodium yellow again when it would probably have been easier to source modern warm white ones.

The circuitry is very minimalist. Basically the LED slapped right across the button cells (which is NOT a good idea) and the classic black blob of resin covering an IC directly bonded to the PCB. That COB chip pulses a 370 ohm coil at about 8mA on a regular cycle to deflect the plastic flame's magnet.

It's a very convincing effect when set up correctly and viewed from a distance.

This unit came from a shop called Hardy's Hardware on Cathcart Road in Glasgow (Scotland). There was a single tray of them at the back of the shop.


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