An Animated LED Fireplace Powered By The CH32V003

Once you’ve mastered the near-magical ability of turning your ideas into a piece of hardware you can hold in your hand, it’s only natural that you’ll want to spread the joy. The holidays are a perfect time to produce a custom piece of electronics for friends and family, but there’s a catch: going from making one or two of something to making dozens of them can introduce some interesting challenges. Not only will you want to cost optimize your design, but to save yourself some aggravation, you’ll likely want to simplify the assembly process.

The fifty electronic fireplaces designed by built by [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] are a perfect example of both concepts, and while we’re coming across it a bit late for this year’s gift exchange, we wouldn’t be surprised if these MIT-licensed beauties end up under a few more trees in 2024.

To help keep the costs per unit down, the team went with the CH32V003 microcontroller, a surprisingly capable RISC-V chip that can be had for as little as 10 cents a piece. Beyond that, there’s an 8 x 8 matrix of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs, a buzzer for playing sound effects and music, and a photoresistor to sense the ambient light level. User input is handled with a trio of touch-sensitive pads built into the PCB, which are connected to the MCU via nothing more exotic than some resistors.

Note the 3D printed separator that goes on top of the LED matrix, and the laser-cut acrylic front panel that covers the diffuser.

Most of the components go on the rearmost of the PCB stack, with the middle board holding only the USB-C port and capacitive buttons. But while the center board might not do much electrically, its exposed FR4 substrate is used as a diffuser for the LED matrix behind it. The top board is purely decorative, with the silkscreen image of the bricks and mantel helping sell the overall look. To keep costs and assembly effort further in check, standard header strips were used to interconnect the boards.

This isn’t the first piece of holiday-themed PCB art we saw this year, but there’s always room for more. If you created an electronic gift this year, make sure to let us know.