EE ternal Blinker

You occasionally see advertising signs in shops with a blinking LED that seems to blink forever while operating from a sin-gle battery cell. That’s naturally an irresistible challenge for a true electronics hobbyist. And here’s the circuit. It consists of an astable multivibrator with special proper-ties. A 100-µF electrolytic capacitor is charged relatively slowly at a low current and then discharged via the LED with a short pulse. The circuit also provides the necessary voltage boosting, since 1.5 V is certainly too low for an LED. 

EE-ternal Blinker Circuit Diagram

The two oscillograms demonstrate how the circuit works. The voltage on the collector of the PNP transistor jumps to approximately 1.5 V after the electrolytic capacitor has been discharged to close to 0.3V at this point via a 10-kΩ resistor. It is charged to approximately 1.2 V on the other side. The difference voltage across the electrolytic capacitor is thus 0.9 V when the blink pulse appears. This voltage adds to the battery voltage of 1.5 V to enable the amplitude of the pulse on the LED to be as high as 2.4 V. However, the voltage is actually limited to approximately 1.8 V by the LED, as shown by the second oscillogram. The voltage across the LED automatically matches the voltage of the LED that is used. It can theoretically be as high as 3 V. 

The circuit has been optimised for low-power operation. That is why the actual flip-flop is built using an NPN transistor and a PNP transistor, which avoids wasting control current. The two transistors only conduct during the brief interval when the LED blinks. To ensure stable operating conditions and reliable oscillation, an additional stage with negative DC feedback is included. Here again, especially high resistance values are used to minimise current consumption. 

The current consumption can be estimated based on the charging current of the electrolytic capacitor. The average voltage across the two 10-kΩ charging resistors is 1 V in total. That means that the aver-age charging current is 50 µA. Exactly the same amount of charge is also drawn from the battery during the LED pulse. The average current is thus around 100 µA. If we assume a battery capacity of 2500 mAh, the battery should last for around 25,000 hours. That is more than two years, which is nearly an eternity. As the current decreases slightly as the bat-ter voltage drops, causing the LED to blink less brightly, the actual useful life could be even longer. That makes it more than (almost) eternal.

Author : Burkhard Kainka