Hardwarearduboyesp32tinymlledmaker
Arduboy Maker Kevin Bates' $149 Digital Candle Generates Its Flicker With a 3,545-Parameter Neural Network on 144 LEDs
The Digital Candle is a 10-inch circuit board with a 9 × 16 grid of amber LEDs driven by an ESP32-S3 running a tiny model trained on phone footage of one real candle, generated on the board with the radios off. It sells for $149 from Arduboy's shop.
Kevin Bates, who makes the Arduboy game handhelds, signs the project site as “an object by Kevin Bates, made with the help of other humans and several machines.” The shop page calls it “the world’s first AI-powered candle” and promises a flame that’s “never repeating.”
The model is small even by microcontroller standards. Arduboy’s spec list reads “8-dimensional latent, convolutional decoder, 3,545 parameters, 30 fps.” The site explains where it came from: “Phone recordings of one candle in a dark room, including a slow-motion take, cropped and reduced to 144 pixels.” A decoder learned what that flame looks like, and a separate random process, “a stochastic model fitted to its flicker,” keeps feeding it new values so the pattern doesn’t cycle.
None of it touches the internet. The FAQ says “the flame is generated entirely on the board, with the radios off.” The candles can talk to each other on a private network to sync their flicker, but that feature ships turned off.
Under the flame is a general-purpose board. The site lists other programs for the grid, from a clock and notification light to digital rain, Conway’s Life and Breakout, and says the candle “is open source and can be reprogrammed via USB-C.”
What they didn’t say. The GitHub repository carries an MIT license but no code yet. Its README says “the firmware, the model and the tools for writing your own apps for the matrix will be published here,” in future tense. There’s no battery listed anywhere; power comes from a USB-C dock that holds the board upright, and the site adds “USB-C cable not included.” Neither page gives a power draw, which matters for a thing the site suggests you “leave on all night, or all winter.”
| Digital Candle | Arduboy FX-C | Ingo Maurer My New Flame | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $149 | From $79 | Not on the maker’s page |
| Display | 144 amber LEDs, 9 × 16 | 128 × 64 1-bit OLED | Two panels of 128 LEDs |
| How the flame is made | Neural network trained on real candle footage, generated live | No flame | Driven “based on video material” |
| Chip | ESP32-S3 with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE | ATmega32u4 | Not on the maker’s page |
| Power | USB-C, 5V, dock included | Not compared | 4 NiMH AA cells or USB-C, 0.6W |
| Reprogrammable | Yes, over USB-C; code not yet posted | Not compared | Not on the maker’s page |
The FX-C is the closest thing to a predecessor, Bates’ own $79 handheld, and the candle costs $70 more. The real rival is the one he credits: Ingo Maurer’s My New Flame, a 2012 design by Moritz Waldemeyer and Ingo Maurer’s team that plays recorded flame video across 256 LEDs.
The candle is sold in Black and White editions, which the site says are “available in unlimited editions,” with other colors possibly limited. What it can’t yet answer is the open-source promise, since the model weights and training tools are still on their way to GitHub.