This LED Flare project by Moon Taj is an interesting PIC microcontroller based LED project. You could make this yourself since the schematic and firmware has been posted for us to enjoy.
Thanks Kevin.
“Presented here is a novelty LED “flare”. It’s loosely fashioned from automotive LED safety flares but with a eye toward fun.The combination of display patterns is limited only by your imagination. Our source code provides a minimal base of patterns you can build from. This project was deigned to be low cost, have a low part count and also be easily made at home.”