Led circuits

The LED flasher circuits below operate on a single 1.5 volt battery. The circuit on the upper right uses the popular LM3909 LED flasher IC and requires only a timing capacitor and LED. The top left circuit, designed by Andre De-Guerin illustrates using a 100uF capacitor to double the battery voltage to obtain 3 volts for the LED. Two sections of a 74HC04 hex inverter are used as a squarewave oscillator that establishes the flash rate while a third section is used as a buffer that charges the capacitor in series with a 470 ohm resistor while the buffer output is at +1.5 volts.

The LED flasher circuits below operate on a single 1.5 volt battery. The circuit on the upper right uses the popular LM3909 LED flasher IC and requires only a timing capacitor and LED. The top left circuit, designed by Andre De-Guerin illustrates using a 100uF capacitor to double the battery voltage to obtain 3 volts for the LED. Two sections of a 74HC04 hex inverter are used as a squarewave oscillator that establishes the flash rate while a third section is used as a buffer that charges the capacitor in series with a 470 ohm resistor while the buffer output is at +1.5 volts. When the buffer output switches to ground (zero volts) the charged capacitor is placed in series with the LED and the battery which supplies enough voltage to illuminate the LED. The LED current is approximately 3 mA, so a high brightness LED is recommended.

Although white LEDs are common in a variety of lighting applications, their 3 to 4V forward-voltage drop makes low-voltage applications challenging. Charge pumps and other ICs are available for driving white LEDs, but they generally don't work with the low supply voltage of 1.5V in single-cell-battery applications. The low-voltage circuit of Figure 1 provides a current-regulated output suitable for driving white LEDs. The boost converter, IC1, can supply load currents to 62 mA with input voltages as low as 1.2V, making it suitable for use with a 1.5V, single-cell battery.

The 8-lead plastic mini-DIP LM3909 IC was developed by National Semiconductor in the mid 'seventies of the past century. It was a monolithic oscillator specifically designed to flash Light Emitting Diodes. By using the timing capacitor for voltage boost, it delivered pulses of 2 or more volts to the LED while operating on a supply of 1.5V or less. The circuit was inherently self-starting, and required addition of only a battery and capacitor to function as an LED flasher. Unfortunately, since 1998, the manufacturer discontinued the production of this chip. For this reason, and on request of some correspondents, I tried to emulate this IC operation using common discrete components, obtaining unexpected satisfactory results.

Many published circuits that flash LEDs need 3 volts or more. This circuit uses only a single inexpensive C-MOS IC and flashes the LED for a full year on a single 1.5 volt AA alkaline battery cell. The circuit uses a charge pump technique to provide the LED the needed voltage.

To squeeze even more energy from a alkaline battery cell, this circuit adds two transistors to a circuit similar to the above design to boost the efficiency. A small 1.5 volt alkaline N cell should flash the LED for a full year. It too uses a "charge pump" technique to provide a LED the needed voltage.

The basic circuit illuminates up to ten LEDs in sequence, following the rhythm of music or speech picked-up by a small microphone. The expanded version can drive up to ten strips, formed by up to five LEDs each, at 9V supply. IC1A amplifies about 100 times the audio signal picked-up by the microphone and drives IC1B acting as peak-voltage detector. Its output peaks are synchronous with the peaks of the input signal and clock IC2, a ring decade counter capable of driving up to ten LEDs in sequence. An additional circuit allows the driving of up to ten strips, made up by five LEDs each (max.), at 9V supply. It is formed by a 10mA constant current source (Q1 & Q2) common to all LED strips and by a switching transistor (Q3), driving a strip obtained from 2 to 5 series-connected LEDs. Therefore one transistor and its Base resistor are required to drive each of the strips used.

Each time switch S1 is closed the count on the CD4017 advances by 1 step and the coresponding LED turns on. When the maximium count plus 1 is reached for each circuit the cycle is restarted and repeats.

The LTC3201 contains overtemperature protection and can survive an indefinite output short to GND. Low external parts count (one small flying capacitor and three small bypass capacitors) and small MSOP-10 package size make the LTC3201 ideally suited for space constrained applications. An input noise filter further reduces input noise,thus enabling direct connection to the battery. The LTC®3201 is an ultralow noise, constant frequency, charge pump DC/DC converter specifically designed for powering white LEDs. The part produces a low noise boosted supply capable of supplying 100mA of output current. LED current is regulated for accurate and stable backlighting. A 3-bit DAC provides output current adjust for brightness control.

This circuit is the 12-bit binary counter which used 4040B. The number of the pulses of the input can be confirmed by seeing it with the eyes by putting the light-emitting diode to the output of the counter. It is the function only of it but it is useful. Because it is the 12 bits, the highest rank counter is divided to 1/4096. Because it is, in the highest rank, the signal of 4KHz can be seen in the about 500-millisecond blink. At the input circuit, it is protecting the counter IC from the excessive input voltage with the resistor and the Zener diode.