ghostie arduino chanukiah
for xanuka this year, i made a little electronic chanukiah that i want to share! i know i’m not the only person who can’t do flame-based candles for some reason or another.
this chanukiah is an online simulation that you can run in any web browser, and it is, in my grandiose and objectively correct opinion, better than any other electric chanukiah out there right now.
lots of electric chanukiot do a decent job at emulating the visual appearance of a flame-based chanukiah. the goal with this project was to emulate not only the 🕎visual appearance🕎 of a chanukiah, but also the 🔥ritual experience🔥 of lighting the candles and watching them burn.
some neat features of the ghostie arduino chanukiah:
- candle representation: each candle is represented by a stack of LED lights, and you can make the candles any color you want! if you can express it with a hex code, it’s a valid candle color. there’s also two bonus gradient patterns.
- lighting the candles: you press a button to light the shamash, then you light each candle that you want by moving a slider that lights up its light sensor.
- watching the candles burn: after a candle is lit, the top LED begins to flicker like a flame! and after that, the candle slowly and semi-randomly begins to burn down- the top LED goes dark, and the next one in the stack begins to flicker, and so on, until the light goes out at the bottom of the stack.
- clean up: all the candles will burn out on their own over the course of 30-ish minutes(plus or minus like, 20. i should really optimize the burn pattern a little, lol). after that, you can stop the simulation and reset it for the next night.
it works great on both mobile and desktop, so put it on whatever device you want. a note for mobile users: instructions for use are in the “code” tab, on the top right!
check it out at: https://wokwi.com/projects/353600148292695041