Where did the time fly? I turned around for a second and The leaves turned colors, it got cold, and now suddenly it is Halloween. Then the year is down hill from here. There is still a lot to get done.
I have been busy getting my Christmas ornaments done. I use plural because during some of my procrastination on one project I started up another. That sounds like me.
The main ornament is a PCB snowman. I am using a circuit from last year for it. It is off to PCBway.com for manufacturing. I am looking forward to getting them done early! I have all of the parts already. Mid-PCB design I placed an order with Digikey for the various bits and bytes needed. I am running it on an ATTiny45. There will more on the snowman in an upcoming post. For now. . .
This is the stray project that came together.
While putting off working on the snowman PCB (I was wore out that week) I started to clean the bench off a bit. I stumbled upon a box that had some parts for a Christmas project that didn’t make it off the ground last year and they were stuck on the side. I stared at them a bit thinking I might use them, but no, I need to get the PCB done, but. . . Later that night I found a web site with a 555 timer circuit for blinking multiple LEDs. Once I saw the schematic it all kind of fell together.
It didn’t take long to get a bug for another project.
I have a drawer full of 555 timers; at one time I was going to do a boatload of 555 projects, then I saw a shinny penny. Wiring it up was pretty straight forward. I didn’t have a variable resistor handy, so I played around with different resistor values. 47k was blinking pretty fast. I grabbed a 100k and it has a pleasant rate of blinking. Also the cap keeps the lights going for about 3 additional cycles once power is removed.
It lives on the breadboard! A good first step. I am waffling between just doing a dead bug for this as I am only going to make 1, maybe 2 if I get ambitious. This one is more for my collection.
All this while I have been using a 5v wall wart to power the breadboard version of my project. Here comes another project decision, how to power it out in the wide. My snowman is using a CR2032 so that was my first thought. I jerry-rigged a battery holder and wired it to both the breadboard and my multimeter. I put it going on a fresh battery and it was downhill from there. Really. It didn’t last long in my opinion. It was almost a half an hour. I don’t want to use a 9v due to expense and how many people have spares of those laying around. Tonight I am going to wire up a battery holder and test out a couple of AAA and see how they fair.
It could be that in the end I may just have to go with a tail and wire up a USB cable to wall charger. Lets see how things go.
Projects that haven’t been forgotten and still working on: B.A.M. and the digital clock.
© 2019, wrightmac. All rights reserved.
No tags for this post.