High power LED blinking circuit
posted Jun 18th 2008 2:02pm by Juan Aguilarfiled under: led hacks, misc hacks
Evil Mad Scientist Labs brings us this easy to make LED blinking circuit. The idea is to put a LED in series with a small blinking incandescent bulb from a string of Christmas lights. The bulb has an internal bimetallic strip that bends out of shape when it heats up, cutting the circuit. when it cools enough, it returns to its original shape and closes the circuit again, making the bulb and the LED turn on. Both lights have short period of sustained light when they are initially powered up since the bimetallic strip is still warming up.
The project uses a 5W blue LED, the aforementioned bulb, and a 6V battery pack loaded with 3 AAA batteries. The battery pack and the lights are all attached to a small section of perforated board. Duplicating this project should be easy and provide a very bright LED, but to make a 5W LED shine its brightest, a larger bulb and a heatsink will be necessary.
The light is clever, and saves you the need for a resister, but unfortunately your “immortal” diode circuit is now mortal. :p
(And of course the auxiliary light might be annoying… if it suited your purpose, you wouldn’t need the LED!)
Surely someone makes a reusable fuse that operates on the same principle as the light?
Posted at 4:15 pm on Jun 18th, 2008 by sackofcatfood