I would like to ask a fast question, I don't belive it is very complex, I made an extremely simple circuit, to use a photoresistor as a laser detector, this might be the wrong place to ask, but im giving it a shot, the "laser" im using is just a 3 dollar wal-mart laser pointer, I took a photoresistor, out of a grab bag from radio shack, and a blue LED, and a variable resistor, I put the variable resistor in line with the photoresistor, then to the positive side of the led, and the other side of the LED to ground, its using +12 volts, only because im using a +12 volt adapter, that was lying on my work bench already, I have no target voltage in mind, all its intended to do is latch an SCR, or maybe just a pnp-npn combo, I just wanted to ask if anyone has a better idea, it works but the main problems are, I cant get the photocell, acclimated to ambient indoor lighting, so it was always on, covering it with black electrical tape fixed that, the LED turns on, and then bleeds back to off, VERY slowly, so I think im getting current leakage thru the resisters, my first guess is that 12 volts is to high, im going to give 5 volts a try in the morning, but I was wondering if anyone might know of a simple and fast alternative, I have a IR emitter/receiver, and I tried using the receiver in place of the photocell, with no luck, I have done a lot of google research and all the circuits I come up with are either to complex for what I need, or use 2 photocells, im planning on only using one, for a pulsed on-off, anyways, just wondering if anyone might have any helpful hints, you don't necessarily need to draw/type out any schematics for me, just a helpful nudge in the right direction would be great, sorry for rambling so long lol =), also, this is for an extremely low tech project, so it doesn't have to be great, just so it stays off in ambient room lighting, no more intense than the lighting in a normal home lol, I also played with a comparator circuit, to just read the ambient light as a baseline, and the laser would be the trigger, but I need to build about 50 of these, so the more simple and the cheaper the better.