Deluxe LED Menorah Kit

About our Deluxe LED Menorah Kits

Our Deluxe LED Menorah kit is an updated take on the traditional hanukkiyah, the nine-armed Hanukkah candelabrum. Two candles are lit on the first night of Hanukkah (one "real" candle plus the lighter candle, or shamash), three on the second night, right up to nine on the eighth night. (That's (2+9)*(8/2)=44 candles all together, for those of you keeping score.)

Ours works pretty much the same way, but uses less wax. When you turn it on, it displays the correct configuration of LED "candles" for a given night of Hanukkah. Each time that you press the button (or switch it off and back on), it displays one more light than it did the previous time that you turned it on (unless it showed all nine last time, in which case it goes back to two). The LEDs are lit up in the traditional sequence, with a gentle fade. You can also easily switch (by a button press) between having your LEDs steadily on, or gently rippling with our new "candle flicker" mode.

The Deluxe LED Menorah kit is based on the same "ix" circuit board as our popular Larson Scanner kit. This menorah kit is very easy to build, and includes a pre-programmed microcontroller, battery holder, nine ultrabright LEDs, an alignment guide for the LEDs, and a laser-cut acrylic stand. Once you've built it, you'll have an elegant little LED menorah, ready for the season.

The kit comes with 10 mm (huge!) diffused lens LEDs. The standard kit has yellow LEDs, and requires two AA cells (not included). An upgraded version that comes with blue or white LEDs is also available, and it requires three AA cells (again, not included).

Any of the versions can be built with the shamash in the center or on the side (you get to decide while you're building it) and the LEDs can be mounted flush to the circuit board or up to 1 cm above it. The circuit board itself is 5 x 1.3" in size (12.7 x 3.3 cm).

The Deluxe LED Menorah kit is a soldering kit [?]. Basic electronic soldering skill is required, and you provide standard soldering tools: a soldering iron + solder and small ("flush") wire clippers. No additional knowledge of electronics is presumed or required -- and no programming is required either.

Easy "through-hole" construction ("No surface-mount nothin' nowhere!"). Clear, full-color comic-book style printed instructions are provided with the kit. If you would like a preview, you can download a copy of the assembly guide here (4.7 MB PDF file).

This is an open-source hardware+software project, designed to be hackable and "more kosher than a bacon cheeseburger." Design files and source code for this project can be found at the Evil Mad Scientist Wiki.

Lead Free
These kits kits are RoHS compliant (lead free). If you're building one of our kits, you'll find that everything works well with either regular or lead-free solder-- whichever you care to use.