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Help me win an office xmas contest. (electronics advice)
Dark_Side
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
We're having a stocking design contest at our office this year with the winner getting some mysterious prize. They provided a bunch of decoration stuff, your standard fare such as glitter, lettering, tinsel, stuff like that. But in order to claim myself as the champion of the office, I have decided to instead build a harness of LED's to stick around the border of my stocking which I can hopefully program to blink in differing patterns.
In a perfect world I would have ordered a Arduino microcontroller and fabbed the whole thing up over the last couple of weeks, but I didn't and now only have this weekend to pull it off. Anyone have any ideas on a cheap, effective way to do this with off the shelf parts?
My goals are to have blinking LED's in a simple chase pattern, or barring that blinking on and off in sets. I did some research on google, but didn't find anything that really jumped out at me. I have all the equipment to build this, I just have never had to design something like this before and am strapped for time.
In a perfect world I would have ordered a Arduino microcontroller and fabbed the whole thing up over the last couple of weeks, but I didn't and now only have this weekend to pull it off. Anyone have any ideas on a cheap, effective way to do this with off the shelf parts?
My goals are to have blinking LED's in a simple chase pattern, or barring that blinking on and off in sets. I did some research on google, but didn't find anything that really jumped out at me. I have all the equipment to build this, I just have never had to design something like this before and am strapped for time.
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You then just need three blinking circuits each hooked up to a set of LED's, that you run offset from eachother. Three 555 timer circuits is the simplest way I can think of.
You build the 3 circuits (which for a 555 are really really simple), give each a switch to turn it on, and then flip them one at a time.
You might need to drive the LED's with a transistor if you have more than a few, but other than that its minimal parts, and no other hardware needed.
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_4/chpt_12/6.html
It looks like it will do exactly what you want.
Edit: If a 5-bit chaser is preferred over a 10-bit chaser, you might want to consider using a wired OR configuration with diodes (e.g. connect Q0 with Q5 using a wired OR, then Q1 with Q6, etc...)
Good point. A shift register is ideal. Then you would only need one 555 or similar generating the clock, and one chip full of flip flops.
Yeah after looking through some of the circuits posted, that looks to be the easiest way to pull it off. Though I may just say fuck it and hack up some xmas lights to run off a battery.
I'm going to use wire to hang the board in the middle of the wire frame and if I get enough time I hope to fab up a merry x mas with black lettering and fiber optic cable interspersed throughout to light it up, but that's probably a pipe dream at this point.
Pic of prototype.