3 light chaser circuit

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
I would like to make a circuit, (without using any ICs), that chases 3 lights, (1 channel on at a time). I have tried expanding a 2-channel astable multivibrator circuit to 3 channels, but 2 lights are on at once instead of just one.

So, how should I go about making such a 3-channel light chaser? It might be more complex than I think.
 

TheButtonThief

Joined Feb 26, 2011
237
make a shift register using just transistors. There'd be a lot of them but think about it, an IC is just a heap of tiny resistors so if you want to build a circuit that would be easily done with an IC but you don't want to use the IC, just build the equivalent circuit with transistors.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Is this what you were trying to do?

Oh, yeah! That works great. I'll be lighting some 6v incandescent lights though, (2 with 18 ohm loads, and 1 with a 15 ohm load), so I'd have to use a higher voltage, Maybe 12v and divide the voltage with corresponding 18 ohm and 15 ohm resistors instead of the 1K resistors. I do have some 1A rated transistors that would work for this. I wonder if there is a way for me to pull less current through the transistor, 600mA is a lot to pull just to turn a light off.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Hmmm, my LTSpice simulator can not run this, and I don't have any 1A pnp transistors on hand, but I wonder if this would work. I disconnected the load from across the npn transistor, then I use a pnp transistor to operate the load. I wish I was more familiar with using pnp transistors.

What do you think?

Master Wu.jpg
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
I just need to ditch the 100K resistor, don't I? Then it should do 1 light at a time. I'll use a diode to drain the capacitor to ground also.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Well, I tried my simulator with those values in the Xmas light schematic, but I built my circuit using a 470 ohm load with LEDs, and a 9v battery; all other values are the same. The effect is confusing; sometimes I can trigger a very slow chase by charging one of the capacitors before running it. But I always read about a 140ns wave period on my oscilloscope between the capacitor and the 100 ohm resistor. I tried changing the capacitors from 220uF to 22uF, and nothing changed.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Hmm, it looks like the 140ns wave is coming from the diodes.

Well, Dodgydave, it looks like I will be using a 555 timer or something similar, I just thought this circuit could be simply done with a few transistors and capacitors.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Why dont you use a 555 timer clock to feed a Cd4017 decade counter, set to 3 instead of all this hassle with transistors??
The real issue is that I need to drive 6V incondecent lighting. this requires a much higher load than any LED, so I have to drive this load through some external circuitry. I would have to trigger an external transistor through a buffer for each channel. This would work, except that I am trying to fit all of this in a very small space of 1.875 X 0.9375 inches.

Maybe surface mounting chips will be small enough.
 

Thread Starter

raisintoe

Joined Mar 24, 2012
46
Ha ha ha! So the noob strikes again! All I had to do was use the astable multivibrator model as a reference to trigger my load:The noob strikes again.jpg
 
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