LED fire place with 8 pin G2230

[GG430 53]

I wanted to add a small fireplace to our christmas crib and thought it needs a 430 ;-)

It was a pretty small project, but fun though. The LEDs are driven by a pseudo random generator. I think it looks kind of OK, the color could be more improved with the yellow to red ratio (I'll keep it on the backlog for next xmass ;-) )

I made a pretty simple one sided "Dremel" board to hold the MSP430G2230 and the LEDs.The 1.27mm pitch enables the pretty fast way to get a useable PCB and the four port pins are just enough for this.

 

 

[spirilis 1,265]

Neat!  Always love seeing creativity applied to small contraints like these MCUs

[timotet 44]

+1 super creative!

[username 198]

You hand dremel-ed a board that uses a msp430 tssop package? Nwice!  Still cool either way! Thanks for sharing.

[cde 334]

I wanted to add a small fireplace to our christmas crib and thought it needs a 430 ;-)

It was a pretty small project, but fun though. The LEDs are driven by a pseudo random generator. I think it looks kind of OK, the color could be more improved with the yellow to red ratio (I'll keep it on the backlog for next xmass ;-) )

I made a pretty simple one sided "Dremel" board to hold the MSP430G2230 and the LEDs.The 1.27mm pitch enables the pretty fast way to get a useable PCB and the four port pins are just enough for this.

 

LED Feuer 2.0.jpg

 

Neat. The flashing looks a little too fast imho for a fire, but that might just be the video. Since you have a spare pin you could add in a pot to adjust the speed, or a ldr to turn off the lights are on or its daytime. You could add some some small spots or red/yellow/black glitter to the logs so that it glitters like embers at the edges.

 

Looks like you have three leds controlled by the 430 and one always on?

 

You hand dremel-ed a board that uses a msp430 tssop package? Nwice!  Still cool either way! Thanks for sharing.

It looks like the SOIC version, not the tssop. The tssop are thinner (height wise), but there is 0.65mm soic (not for the msp430s, just in general), for some bizarre reason.

[GG430 53]

@username,

Yes, it's hand-dremel'd. Fast and easy

 

@cde,

You are right, it's the SOIC with 1.27mm pitch. http://www-s.ti.com/sc/psheets/msoi002j/msoi002j.pdf

Just saw that I kind of mixed up the video and the pictures. The video shows my first version, the picture the second.

The second one has one LED always on because the random flicker sometimes was too dark. The initial one which is in the video had 4 LEDs flickering. But I also found 2 red LEDs being too much red.

 

That's the one from the video.

 

I need to make a video of the new version as it looks better (to me at least)

The LDR is a real good idea, so I could have it on all the time. After a while my kids found the switch for the fire and crib's light, annoying ;-)

[roadrunner84 466]

You could attach a RC-5 receiver and use a remote control to enable the fire

 

You use quite a hefty capacitor, why? How do you have it powered, a coin cell or two AA cells (or 3 AA NiMH cells)?

[GG430 53]

Remote control would be another cool option, I should have some TSOP IR receivers flying around somewhere
It's powered from a wall wart, since it

[rockets4kids 204]

Nice job! Is that just one LED you are driving? I'd be willing to bet that if you used several LEDs and spaced them out as much as possible you could get an even better effect -- you should get some motion in your shadows. Better still, you could use different wavelength LEDs (amber through dark red) to vary the color as well.

[GG430 53]

Thanks, in the first version (the one in the video) I had 4 LEDs flicker, 2 yellow and 2 red. Which turned out to be too much red and once in a while it was too dark. That's why I made the new version with one yellow LED on all the time, two yellow and one red flickering. Need to make a new video.