First Post… and how benificial is this to our lives? “Flashing colors!”

wel, you could make a nice light for your girlfriend, that could be good for your relation ;)

@5, slower fading is accomplished by increasing RxC of the RC timers involved. Multiply the capacitor values by the number you want to multiply the fade times by. You can also fiddle with the resistors, but those work in combinaton with eachother and the transistors.

cool, a friend of mine wanted to build something like that (but with more leds) for his hookah table so the water was illuminated… might point this out to him, tho he has probably never in his life touched a resistor…

question: for this case (a led-circle of about 10 cm diameter), would it work with simple red, green and blue leds or should i stick to the rgb ones (presumably more expensive and harder to find)?

If all you want is a slow trippy LED colour changer, you can buy triple-die LEDs with the control circuitry built into them – they’re normal-looking two-lead water-clear LEDs, and to make them work, you just connect them to about three volts. Two alkalines in series can run a bunch of them in parallel.

They get out of sync pretty fast, but I consider that to be a feature rather than a bug; the cheap ones also have a pretty high incidence of LEDs that don’t quite cycle colours right, but they’re so _very_ cheap that nobody cares:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=7611803623

Once again the sweaty, clueless masses miss the point. (sigh)

Getting a bit predictable around here…

the schematic seems to be incorrect… I think all the LED resistors should be 220 ohms and that the capacitor on the 555 should be 10uf not 100uf…. at least from the parts list that’s what I got

any suggestions?

My hacking days are starting as soon as I get my soldering iron. Would this be a good first project?