Festival of Lite-Brites
Thanks to MAKE for the tip about this open source LED menorah kit from EvilMadScientist.com. This looks easy and reasonably impressive, although I’m not sure whether the current would flow perceptibly in either a Shammai (oldest to newest “candle”) OR a Hillel (newest to oldest) direction. Engineers, you check it out and let us know. I’ll get my soldering kit ready to go.
cool – although – Shammai would light 8 the first night then 7 the second etc…
Looking at the source code menorah.c, it has a “low power” and a “high power” mode. In the latter case, it turns them all on simultaneously. In the “low power” mode, it lights each candle in sequence like this (example for day 5, 0 being the first day):
0000 0 0001
0000 0 0010
0000 0 0100
0000 0 1000
0000 1 0000
0001 0 0000
0010 0 0000
0000 0 0000
0000 0 0000 (repeating…)
In this mode, only one LED is active at any time, though the sequence is not visible to the naked eye (each step in low-power mode is only a few milliseconds). It also lights them out of order since the shamash comes in the middle of the sequence. 🙂
damn. i knew i remembered that hillel/shammai dispute wrong. thanks for the correction. ya’ll get the idea. and thanks for the code insight jonathan!!!