Hanukkah is fun! It's the festival of lights. Sure, there was oil that lasted eight days. But how would the story of Hanukkah have gone down if the Israelites had LEDs? Today, that story can be told...

What is it?

This is a PCB Hanukkah menorah that uses LEDs instead of candles. I designed it last year for friends and family. Folks liked it and suggested that it was cool enough to try to sell, so here we are.

The design is total simplicity. The LEDs are driven by two 8-bit shift registers, except for the shamash LEDs, which are driven directly by the processor. The processor is an Atmel Attiny84A. Power comes from two AAA batteries (that you supply).

Why did I make it?

For fun! (And to practice SMD soldering!)

Why is it special?

What makes this menorah a little bit special is that in addition to doing the normal menorah stuff of showing lights for each night of Hanukkah, this one also has some special "trick" modes such as a Knight Rider reminiscent "scanner mode" -- and a few more.

Furthermore, these are powered by a microcontroller and there's a debug header, so they are fully hackable!

Kit Version

If you like, you can get this menorah delivered to you as a partial kit. The controller chip will be soldered on the board since I need to do that in order to program it. However, everything else will be for you to attach. There are two shift register chips, 18 0805 LEDs and 18 0603 resistors and a handful of capacitors and a few buttons. It's a very simple "low-stress" kit, but you do have to be comfortable with smallish components!

The other menorah

This is the smaller of two near-twin products. The other one works identically, but is a bit larger: The Hanukiah Model II