To the company: Thanks for allowing the full teardown video. Being able to see what this device is made of and it's quality internally makes me want to purchase it!
I would guess they did not use a random generator for the effect because a flame needs to have a heavy weighting to the bottom over the top. Future lamps can have cool near never repeating loops but for good flame you would want a repeating loop at some point. Maybe v2 could have 10 or 20 seconds of repeat. The pattern would be rather small in memory size.
You're right, you can't just display random noise and expect it to look like a flame - but back in the days of assembly demo/compos flame generator code was like digital clocks are for electronics amateurs: everyone wrote one. You could use one of the better ones feeding off the shift random generator and it would be a truly random flame; the code size involved is _tiny_...
To manufacturers: 1. If you don't want people to reveal what's inside, simply POT THE THING IN BLACK RESIN! 2. Counterfeiters buy things THEN reverse engineer them, they don't rely on RU-vid videos. 3. If you are confident about your product, don't pull someone's video down. 4. Awesome factor of your product relies on your public actions.
Reverse engineering and counterfeiting are two different things. There are no good design engineers who have not reverse engineered extensively. Its part of the process. In fact the very first step when given the task to design a widget it a study of the available widgets. It much cheaper to copy than it is to start from scratch. People who have issues with this have hang ups that are not compatible with design engineering. There is absolutely nothing illegal or immoral about copying another person's design. The did not reinvent the wheel to get to the moon. This is the first thing I teach new engineers when I break them in.
Interesting tear-down video. I'm considering getting a couple of these to replace the noisy mechanism in our flame-effect fire, but I'd have to find a way of disabling the switching between modes on sequential power cycles
I wonder if it would look even better with some of the leds around the bottom edge being cold-white to simulate the hotter part of the flame. Maybe even warmer ones near the top.
That's a good idea for more realism - I'm probably weird but I also think unrealistic flame colours (purple, green etc.) would also be a terrific option.
I think it would look a bit better if it had a better, more random-ish flame effect. Like, here, you can tell that it is a pattern that repeats. Maybe over the course of a few seconds to a few minutes, it would speed up/slow down, and the flames would "lick" more randomly as well.
If I was going to copy a design I wouldn't rely on BIGCLIVE. I would get one in the shop. I think you probably did them a great service but publicizing their product . Most of the time I don't really understand what you are explaining but I truly enjoy every video. thank you.
I spray painted one red and put it in a Himalayan salt lamp, chunks of salt in a wire basket. I had to do some tweeks and set in in a black bowel. It looks awesome! I love this kind of thing.
Thanks for this review. I've now purchased several of these and it was very "illuminating" (sorry) to be shown the difference between complex display patterns and lesser, simpler displays. Very happy with these and ordering more. BTW, they offer base up or base down versions which made hanging strings very cool to watch.
I'm finding a couple of sellers on Amazon (searching from the U.S.) that are selling these for $26.99. Searching "LED Flame Bulb" will find two different sellers, plus a lot of other products that aren't these. These are quite neat! Thanks for making us all aware, Big Clive!
+Not Your Everyday Timelord --> I still would like to see him purchase one himself to test. Most times manufacturers when asked to send you an item for review they send you one from a special "high quality batch" reserved for reviewers. Perhaps have it sent to his brother's house so they don't know it's him.
I'm glad the company relaxed their stance,so lets cut them slack since they made the right decision. I'm definitely going to be contacting them since I'd like to try a few out for the holidays.If they're as well built as they appear I also have a idea they might be able to do for me in the future.
I believe this is the same unit, judging especially from the one pic of the interior of the bulb, on Amazon in the US: www.amazon.com/Advanced-Flickering-Multi-function-Emulation-Breathing/dp/B01LD167WO
Just suggested this to friends who do Live action role playing I think its perfect for lanterns torches and even to top wizards staff should be a good market for them in that area
I'll get one when it has the randomizer you mentioned. Repeating patterns in stuff like this is one of my pet peeves. It's really cool how nice the flame looks though.
I've procured four flame effect LED bulbs over the last couple months from aliexpress. Two are the same size as the one in the video. However, they offer two modes, flame, and all-on. On these, the complex array of PCBs, connectors and cables seems to have been tidied up quite a bit. The flexible circuit board holding the LEDs also holds what appears to be a single chip as it folds through a slot on the aluminum tube and extends inside. Only two wires connect it to the power supply board coming up from the base. I haven't further disassembled the bulbs since it appears further disassembly would possibly be destructive. The other two bulbs are smaller, approximately 2"/50mm in diameter. Same height as the others. These are single mode only-flame effect. These also eliminate all the connectors and wires. The LEDs are mounted on the flexible board as before, wrapped into a cylindrical shape, but not an aluminum tube. The PCB tube is smaller in diameter, approx 1.25"/ 32mm. Same number of LEDs as the larger one, but more closely spaced. The PCB tube is mounted on one end to a circular double sided rigid PCB, which forms a base, and contains the brains of the bulb. It has a mystery 18 pin chip and some passives on the out-facing side, and what appears to be 18 transistors and passives on the in-facing side (the bottom of the tube). Again, only two wires (red positive, white negative) connect the whole assembly to the power supply in the base. The light assembly is powered by about 5V, which I verified by powering from a bench supply. Works down to about 3.1V at reasonable brightness. Below that, you can see that it does function, but the LEDs get very dim. According the the power supply, draw at 5V is about 500mA max. At 4V it drops to about 150mA. Not sure how accurate that is, but could make for a neat battery powered hand held lantern effect. Curiously, my dumb Kill-A-Watt says the smaller bulb is about 3W, the larger bulb 1W in flame mode. The large bulbs were less than $12USD, the smaller bulbs less than $8USD when I bought them. The larger ones have been on continuously for about a month, still seem to function fine. I've seen some sheet plastic at the local home improvement center that might be good for further diffusing the LEDs. It's clear, but textured so that it looks like rain rivulets on glass, designed to allow maximum light transmission, but highly and randomly distorted, the sort of thing one might use for a shower stall or bathroom to offer a degree of privacy. Really neat bulbs. We'll see how long they last.
At the local makers fair last year (July 2015) a torchlight somewhat similar to this was demonstrated. That torch uses strips of addressable LED RGB tape running vertical long the cylinder replicated around the outside of the cylinder. The led flame pattern was driven by an arduino. There was also a mode which displayed scrolling text. Easy project for the hobby crowd. Just use the outside of a beer can for the cylinder. :)
The animation reminds me of a cylindrically wrapped representation of one of the audio spectrum visualisers available on some of the PlayStation 1 consoles when playing CD music from it - cycling through various schemes as well as color ranges on the visualiser for viewing on TV. There was one scheme that looked like licking flames across the screen once the color option was cycled to the orange-yellow spectrum.
I would have liked to have seen a bit more analysis of the safety features (since that is what so many of these videos highlight). Was that an isolation slot I saw under the transformer?
I am TOTALLY buying this for my haunted house! I have a set of 'tortured torchieres' with a standard incandescent lamp on one of several flicker flame units. It is semi OK but never had the POP I wanted.
hi Clive I see you are rocking the ZZ Top look lol ... WOW this looks fantastic it's nice to see someone actually using ribbon cable than single stranded cable . another fantastic tear down from you keep up the great work you do 😎
The fade-on/fade-off looks like a handy flashing beacon (if you change out the LEDs for red ones) like those seen on the tops of radio towers to warn low-flying aircraft.
FWIW, I've done LED sequencing and tried randomizing via feedback shift registers, and I've found that I always started getting recognizable patterns. I experimented with a few different methods, and wound up using a Mercenne twister algorithm. Implementing that for 32 bits even on a small microcontroller is very quick, there are integer versions available easily online. I got lovely results using that.
I bought one. I put it in a IKEA GRÖNÖ Table lamp Frosted glass white. It looks fantastic. One late nght i had it by my kitchen window and my neighbour banged at my door thinking my flat was on fire. Its very realistic.
Seems line their site is down. also they didn't turn off PHP warnings/errors and they get fed straight back to the user. People with malicious intents will probably be really happy about that.
Poking around on their products page they do have some really nice variations on this basic lamp. I especially like the ones that look like old kerosene lanterns.
Thanks very much for this! Your manner of doing this is perfect. No trying to charm us into purchasing something nor pushing us into subscribing and becoming your fans. It is appealing because it is the information and your enthusiasm about it and itself. It makes me curious about a lot of things I don't know, and now I have a great flame bulb to purchase lol!
And i thought you said you would not give away too much, but its very clever :-D. Im sure it will catch on, shame they didnt get production ready for xmas, imagine the sales :-D
Using a screen from a dead flat screen tv and laying the led strips flat and you could do the fireplace screen I suggested. I may buy one of these. It would be a fun project.
it would be all the funnier if it mostly does something nice , like the candle effect, and randomly says a rude word, and people will be all like 'that candle swore' and it would be just a candle....
The little power module is a current driver, actually, since LED intensity is linear with current, not voltage. Sinking I/O to 3 LED's each per line on each section. Artistically well done. "Echoed" is a good word! 5V/360 Ohms = 14 mA per LED. Probably PWM'ed for efficiency.
Wow! That one has a lot inside it. I bought one, for near the cheapest price, and took it apart. It had no wires inside. It had a board at the base teed with the LED panel and a transformer stuffed into the screw base. That simple design was fine with me, because all I wanted to do was to try a cheap one inside my salt lamp. I stripped the globe, and base off, hooked up a old night-light cord with switch attached directly to the lead power wires, then stuffed it inside my salt lamp. The animation of my bulb is probably bottom rank, but the effect inside the salt lamp is pretty satisfying. Your bulb - I bet - has a much better realistic flame. Looks sophisticated.
I think that this is the lamp that I purchased and it worked great for many weeks. We had a power outage and now it just blinks (strobes) after just a few minutes of being in the flicker mode.
@@bigclivedotcomNewer ones also auto flip so you can use in either orientation. Have you been opening up any of the new ones? Didi I miss a video. Thanks for your wonderful videos. Your video is the reason I bought my (first generation) lamp for my Halloween classroom. Great stuff.
You sound like Big Clive himself saying things like "I'd quite like that lamp"; you must have watched every one of his videos! Not criticizing you, I couldn't hardly do that since I sit on the edge of my chair waiting for a new BigCliveDotCom
when i first saw this i thought it was a joke you were doing that you actually had a lamp burning then it was like oh wow that is damn good i hope this company does good and gets things rollin after all it has the big clive seal of approval ;)
1000 views in 30 minutes is nothing. 1,000 views a *second* would be vaguely DDOS-like, but lots of sites would weather that storm. You don't start calling something a DDOS until it's in the 10,000 to 100,000 views a second level.
@@bigclivedotcom I wondered if you went a bit too far, but if they sent it to you with the thought that you wouldn't take it apart, what exactly were they expecting would happen, right? Anyhow. I'm thinking a lot. I'll let out another thought. I wanted to buy one of those lights, and the links in your description didn't work anymore, and so I looked up the key words on Amazon myself, and I'm finding it difficult to tell if the product has been copied, or not - it's difficult to judge from just the sellers webpages on Amazon. Yet they all have something in common: They don't use a picture of the actual flame effect, but instead they all use the same shitty cgi flame picture pasted onto the product! like they used blender to come up with a flame image in the first place, or augment it, and then pasted it onto it. It looks soo horrible and unconvincing ☺️😁😉😛 Perhaps it's from the same marketing division that thought sending it to ya is a good idea. Oh, and I also found the other style of flame bulbs that are smaller that you also reviewed which have the individual leds in the matrix shine through more. The one in the pink socket. I need to get myself some mood lighting into my home now for me and my guests. :-) I gonna grab one of those bulbs, that come in pairs, that look in shape like yours. They look convincing on other yt videos and what seems to have been added is that the bulbs can now sense their orientation and the flame pattern will move upwards or downwards depending on whether the bulb is turned upside-down down or not. :-) keep it up. I like you
Poor Clive! Leave him be! He only sacrifices shite gadgets from China. Mind you with all those sparks I'm a bit worried about the fire hazard involving that beard! 😉
hi clive. on the strength of your breakdown, i ordered a couple of warmoon bulbs from amazon. i have to say absolutely fantastic fire effects! i'm going to install them into a couple of clear glass, large storm lanterns i have laying about and see how they go. many thanks.
Great review mate, really appreciate your dedication, unfortunately I contacted them manufacturer to purchase a sample of their bulbs but once they knew I'm buying it for my personal use they just ignored my emails and never replied! Horrible customer service!
That's a really neat one, Clive. There are some really gorgeous real gas lamps outside a few brownstones here in NYC, and while these wouldn't be a perfect replacement, since the flame is visible, they're a great idea.
