Christmas is just around the corner and its time to decorate our home with attractive lighting and other stuffs. The above given electronic design may help you to make a personalized Christmas tree lighting by your own. This circuit uses simple IC 555 and Dual flip flop IC to generate various frequency signals and use those signals to lit the LED's in a pattern. This will give a beautiful lighting effect. Also the cost of building this simple circuit is pretty low.
WORKING:
The 555 timer IC was wired as an astable multivibrator which produce square wave as output in its pin 3. The frequency of the output pulse depends on the Resistors and capacitor connected to the pin 7,6 and 2 of the timer IC. Also a pot can be used in the place of Resistor R1 if you wish to alter the operating frequency of the IC 555. The output frequency of the 555 was given by the equation
F= 1.44/ (R2 +2R1)C2
The dual flip flop IC 4013 forms the next stage of this design. The dual flip flops was wired in such a way to divide the frequency of the incoming signal from the astable multivibrator. The IC2:A divides the incoming signal by a factor of 2 and the output signal obtained from the pin 1 will be F/2 frequency of the original signal. On the other hand IC2:B divides the signal further by a factor of 2 and gives F/4 signal frequency in the output pin 13.
The final part of this circuit was the combination of LED's and transistors. The transistors was used to switch the LED's on and off. Only one transistor and LED combination was shown in the circuit for the simplicity of the design. Use individual Transistor and LED combination for each of the output signal that is F, F/2 and F/4 signal outputs.
Each transistor can drive about 20 LED's connected to it. You can increase the number of LED's by choosing the appropriate transistor to do the job. Thus the three different signal frequencies will produce a beautiful lighting effect.
NOTE:
- Substituting R1 with (0-100k) POT will help you to obtain wide range of frequency outputs and it will increase the attractiveness of this lighting effect.
- Choose different color LED's for each output signals.
- Wound the LED's around your tree and your personalized lighting for X-mas tree is ready.
