There’s a part you’ll find in almost every mains powered switch mode power supply that might at first appear to have only one application. An optocoupler sits between the low voltage and the high voltage sides, providing a safely isolated feedback. Can it be used for anything else? [b.kainka] thinks so, and has proved it by making an optocoupler powered LED flasher.
If a part can be made to act as an amplifier with a gain greater than one, then it should also be possible to make it oscillate. We’re reminded of the old joke about it being very easy to make an oscillator except when you want to make one, but in this case when an optocoupler is wired up as an inverting amplifier with appropriate feedback, it will oscillate. In this case the rather large capacitor leading to a longish period, enough to flash an LED.
We like this circuit, combining as it does an unexpected use for a part, and a circuit in which the unusual choice might just be practical. It’s part of our 2025 Component Abuse Challenge, for which you just about still have time to make an entry yourself if you have one.
LOL. IIt’s like the old EE joke about the library card catalog entry (it’s that old a joke) for a book called “Theory of Amplifier Design”. It said “Please see Theory of Oscillator Design”.
Dictionary of computer science entry for “Endless loop ” says “See ‘Loop, Endless'” …
But .. they could have used 555 ..
No video? Also, maybe we can submit hackaday.io as component abuse in itself
I threw this together in ltspice and I can see why there’s no video – all that happens the capacitor slowly charges, and then the LED glows for a couple milliseconds, and repeat.
Still, I have the problem that I can’t quite put together what the things that cause the bistable behavior – I just see the charge/discharge curves
Yea I can maybe see the led light itself being used to trigger the optovoupler to conduct and then allowing the led to shine brighter until it is dead, which then stops conducting as the light went away. However that in no way explains where the pulse comes from to turn the led on in the first place. Maybe I’m very wrong about operation. I am just purely speculating without looking into it further lol.