Although these have been about for a few years now, I've stalled with buying one to take apart because they were initially overpriced for what they are. Their claims of being the most realistic candle effect didn't justify them being more expensive than the dancing flame type LED candles.
Now they are at a more sensible price I bought a couple and took one apart so we could see what's inside them. It turns out there's not a lot inside.
Now I just have to find a source of this newer generation effect LED, as all the ones on eBay are unnatural colours with a lurid pulsing effect. Or maybe just reincarnate an old project which ran a standard warm LED from a PIC microcontroller with a similar effect. I sharpened a glue stick in a pencil sharpener for the flame and drilled a 3mm hole for the LED, and it gave a very similar effect to this one.
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An LED candle. Nothing particularly unusual about that. It's not even the tape with the flame that moves. it just has a slight undulation.

But it is different from the normal LED candles. and it was toted in the packaging as the latest candle. Your realistic most amazing flame effect. and uh, from a distance.

It's not bad, but the idea here is that it's a very, very subtle. It's not like the yellow candle LEDs that just strobe and flicker the ones that used to have a music chip in series with them. Like the Happy Birthday chips, it used to just basically pulse and flicker. This one is very subtle.

Let me show you, that's the best bed one moment, please! It is very subtle. It's a golden white, fairly realistic for a candle flame, and as you can see, it just gently undulates up and down. The no strobbing or flickering. And because the LED is mounted down into this plastic flame shape, as it gets brighter, it does have a slight illusion of going up.

I Don't think there's more than one LED in there I Think it is just a single LED Okay, watch your eyes, the light is coming back. Okay, it's time to grab some tools and disassemble this. Now before I Do so. The construction of this is a plastic flame shape.

The black Wick presumably just sleeving the plastic body has been dipped in wax. so it has that waxy candle. Fuel And then it's very simple base. Here you've got the screw-on base complete with bits of wax and just a couple of AAA cells.

That is all. Um, nothing really obvious looking at the end of it. So I'm just going to grab some tools one moment, please, right? Things worthy of note: I Don't really recommend disassembling these. They are solidly glued together.

The wax doesn't help at all. The only way to get this out was to basically crush the base of the candle. And likewise, when I got the Led Out in because well, there's nothing in here. It's just basically a hollow tube, not even a resistor.

But when I got the to Get the Led Out down to the flame I physically had to cut the flame open at the end I couldn't dissolve the glue and it turns out it is just a three millimeter. LED just stuffed into here and it's got a chip on board and it does everything. There's not even a resistor, so at three volts, it draws just six milliamps. This is good because it should last a very long time.

I Tried to turn the voltage up to four volts to see if this at any voltage regulation in it, but it doesn't. It went up to 22 milliamps at 4 volts. And to go to the full three cells 4.5 volts would have been quite dramatic. It would potentially work with three.

AAA Neco Metal hydride cells if you wanted to boost the brightness. Let me just, uh, power this up. So there's two bars that's a very lightly yellow tinted one and a white one. The white one is the positive.

This is where the wires are so excruciatingly thin that they wouldn't even go into the clips here. I Also noticed that you can crash the Led the it sometimes just jams on it full, but in this case it has reset after being powered down for a moment. Quirky. but that's it.
An undulating flickering LED and a battery pack. That's all we've got in here. The the secret sauce is ultimately going to be the use of that bit of black sleeving to emulate a wick, a burnt Wick and then this little housing for the LED to spread the light around a bit and diffuse it and make it look as though it's undulating up and down a little bit. But it is fundamentally just a flickering LED but quite a good one.

It's very subtle. um, as compared to the traditional yellow LEDs that just strobbed and pulsed, this is much more subtle, but that is it. Almost a bit of an anti-climax I Was hoping for a little circuit board. nothing.

It is literally just a new era flickering. LED.

18 thoughts on “Next generation led candle?”
  1. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars father of Dragons says:

    Clive i desperately need your help. My shengmilo ebike has blown its BMS circuit board and although the company sent another, it also was blown ( the swine's sent a used BMS with old solder on). Is there a way I can safely wire the battery to the bike without the BMS? I use the bike to travel to and from work and desperately need it working mate. Its 48v 17ah for a 1000w motor.

  2. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Phil says:

    Such a shame we missed all the destruction action. I look forward to seeing dismantling and ultimate destruction. The best one to date for me was the lithium battery pack with the nail and hammer in the garden.

  3. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars tim lumsdon says:

    Dobbies sell these

  4. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Innocent_Bystander says:

    From a distance, or on the other side of a curtain, it looks real enough.

  5. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Muonium says:

    If an alkaline aaa is 1200mAh, 2 should last 400 hours in one of these or over 2 weeks. LiFeS2 batteries should power it for over 3 weeks.
    I bought one of those automatic IR detector foam soap dispensers on ebay after you tore it down to show the remarkable pump mechanism 2.5 years ago on here. It's been used 5-10 times a day every day since and the original Li batteries are still going strong. A single 32oz $9 bottle of castile soap diluted to 1/2 strength is still 1/3rd left after as many years refilling the unit when needed.

  6. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Orxenhorf says:

    Everything inside the LED…. time to bust out the microscope and do a Ken Shirriff style reverse engineering of the silicon.

  7. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars FlatBroke612 says:

    โ€œDoc, you really arenโ€™t going to believe thisโ€ but I was lighting LED candles naked and I slipped… thereโ€™s 20 of them up my butt… one in a million doc…

  8. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Someone Somewhere says:

    I've had an led with that software, it gets annoying also

  9. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars dirk walther says:

    Damit dreht sich doch aber die Weihnachtspyramide gar nicht! ๐Ÿ™‚

  10. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Vlad The Evil Cat says:

    "Cut through the flame" I like that sentence for some reason.

  11. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Thomas Dunlap says:

    The color and effect looks a lot like the flickering IKEA candles. I actually would want to try one to see if they match.

  12. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars gudenau says:

    I must say that the candle itself doesn't look super realistic, but the light it gave off was pretty good. Like the halos in the camera it made would be what I'd expect from a candle.

    Maybe for future ones you might consider lighting a real candle too for the sake of comparison?

  13. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars twocvbloke says:

    Surprisingly a nice candle, compared to the flickery crap that is the norm (I bought & dismantled a bunch of some from poundland during pandemic year 1 cos they were crap, one even had used the new fangled "invisible solder" too!), this one seems rather realistic, and as for that "crash", could it be a "hidden feature" where you briefly turn it off and back on to go between two modes (Flicker vs. Static-on)? would be neat if it was… ๐Ÿ™‚

  14. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Antardhana says:

    Seems ideal for crowded vigils.

  15. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars KJ says:

    You sound almost disappointed, Clive! How do you feel about the progress in lighting technology? Do you feel that the simplification takes away from it, or do you enjoy seeing how minimal they can get? Thanks for the countless hours of education, mate. ๐Ÿ‘

  16. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Les Allison says:

    Like it, very nice.
    โœŒโ™ฅ๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

  17. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Phonotical says:

    Please to put it in line with a speaker? ๐Ÿ˜‚

  18. Avataaar/Circle Created with python_avatars Jeremy Voshage says:

    Damn I want a whole string of these for next years Christmas tree. If only the leds could be bought.

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