My original idea was to build the "LED candles" in 1-2 days and place them all over my student's dorm hallway. It would look cool at night , since we have long and dark hallways. It would be cool to put them in theese covered holes in the wall (what's the right word for theese?), they are all over the place.

As a beginner in electronics, I tought it was a cool 1-2 day project to learn some basics. While It turned out to be great for learning, it wasn't a 2 day project :'( (of course, I never estimate the time needed right).

I'll first do the right-kind-of-glowing and later I'll focus on the light sensor part.

I guessed I'd need a LED, battery, capacitors and some resistors. And I had "RC-circuit" and "RLC- circuit" keywords in my mind, but didn't know much about it. After some time googling for some already-made implementations of my idea (combining keywords LED and glowing, flashing, fading, fire, candle... ) I figured out it would be the best to use the famous 555-timer (I actually had some at home). All the analog variants used too many components. Oh and, the best keyword for what I wanted was "Breathing LED" :)

But nobody did exactly what I imagined. All the variants fade the LEDs on and off completely, while I wanted them to be turned on constantly with a subtle up/down fading effect.

How would you do it?