Birthdays are all about friends, gifts, parties, and delicious cakes – and even that’s moving to hi-tech. If you have an uber-geeky kid, you can make their birthday even more memorable. Instead of ordinary wax candles, now you can use LED lights as candles! The interesting part of this cake is that your kid can blow out the LEDs.
Instructables has a recipe for preparing this DIY electronic birthday cake in five simple steps.
“The circuit for this project consists of 20 LEDs arranged in Charlieplexed fashion connected to 5 I/O pins of an 8-pin microcontroller. I used Tiny45 microcontroller. I chose a few colors of LEDs for the birthday candles. I used red, blue, green and yellow LEDs. The circuit is powered with four 1.2V batteries (NiCD or NiMH).”