It's been a few years since I fiddled with electronics. But, a recent project has me digging out my old breadboard and ordering parts again
.
Basically, the goal is to rewire an old busted router to appear powered up, and a couple ports blink as if it were a working router. It's primarilly to irritate an over-zealous network admin here at work who will definately flip out if he saw a non-standard router on someone's desk blinking away, but I don't want to spend an arm and a leg on putting it together.
I'm guessing I'll use a 9v battery, or possibly an external power supply - I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd like to keep as much of the router in it's original form as possible, as I'd hate to waste and have to re-engineer LED alignments etc.
The board for the router is definately multi-layered, so I'm not sure if scraping the topmost and bottom most tracings around the LED's solder-pads and directly soldering to the existing "stands" of LED's will be ok - but I can't imagine that it should be an issue.
Originally I thought to try and get a pseudo "random-ish" looking blink, I'd have two or three 555 timer circuts, one to do the fast-blinking, and a second (or third) to switch on the blinking through a transistor. By using two "switching" timer circuits at slightly varying cycles, I'd get a more random-ish "switching on" of the blinking.
This is probably overly simplistic, but I've not touched electronics for some time, and I'm not familiar enough with PIC programming or even where to get parts for some of the ocillator circuits as suggested in some of the other threads involving randomness. I'm pretty sure I've got enough parts to put together a handful of your standard 555 "LED blinking" type circuits, but would be open to getting additional parts if necessary.
Any ideas or suggestions or feedback would be greatly appreciated!
A site note, as I was digging through my old prototyping gear, it looks like my old multimeter was damaged beyond repair. Logic probe is still in tact, but any suggestions on a decent multimeter? I'm not afraid to spend money on a good one if anyone has any suggestions.
Thanks again!!!
Basically, the goal is to rewire an old busted router to appear powered up, and a couple ports blink as if it were a working router. It's primarilly to irritate an over-zealous network admin here at work who will definately flip out if he saw a non-standard router on someone's desk blinking away, but I don't want to spend an arm and a leg on putting it together.
I'm guessing I'll use a 9v battery, or possibly an external power supply - I'm not entirely sure yet. I'd like to keep as much of the router in it's original form as possible, as I'd hate to waste and have to re-engineer LED alignments etc.
The board for the router is definately multi-layered, so I'm not sure if scraping the topmost and bottom most tracings around the LED's solder-pads and directly soldering to the existing "stands" of LED's will be ok - but I can't imagine that it should be an issue.
Originally I thought to try and get a pseudo "random-ish" looking blink, I'd have two or three 555 timer circuts, one to do the fast-blinking, and a second (or third) to switch on the blinking through a transistor. By using two "switching" timer circuits at slightly varying cycles, I'd get a more random-ish "switching on" of the blinking.
This is probably overly simplistic, but I've not touched electronics for some time, and I'm not familiar enough with PIC programming or even where to get parts for some of the ocillator circuits as suggested in some of the other threads involving randomness. I'm pretty sure I've got enough parts to put together a handful of your standard 555 "LED blinking" type circuits, but would be open to getting additional parts if necessary.
Any ideas or suggestions or feedback would be greatly appreciated!
A site note, as I was digging through my old prototyping gear, it looks like my old multimeter was damaged beyond repair. Logic probe is still in tact, but any suggestions on a decent multimeter? I'm not afraid to spend money on a good one if anyone has any suggestions.
Thanks again!!!