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It's a little wisp of a circuit that allows you to drive a blue or white LED from a low voltage. Normally, if you want to light up a blue or white LED you need to provide it with 3 - 3.5 V, like from a 3 V lithium coin cell. But a 1.5 V battery like a AA cell simply will not work. But using the Joule Thief, it works like a charm. Not only does it work with a brand new battery, but it works until the battery is nearly dead-- down to 0.3 V. That's well below the point where your other toys will tell you the battery is dead, so it can steal every last joule of energy from the battery (hence the name). To learn how to make one, watch the video, which is available in a variety of formats.

The following table shows the features of several LED flasher circuits obtained by changing C or R parts (drawn in red color in the diagram) and voltage supply. The LED (D) should be preferably of the red type.

This the circuit light led flashing ,with show of 10 LED. By use integrated number circuit CD4017 perform be Decade Counter/Divider with 10 Decoded Outputs. Which it is integrated digital circuit CMOS then use the power supply about 9VDC. For a signal input continue the circuit can produce general frequency may use IC NE555 all right.

Here is a circuit for simulating breathing / pulsing LED with the 555 timer chip. It became very popular and i received many comments and emails with people that made this circuit and worked fine, as well as comments with people that had troubles converting it to operate at 12 volts supply. It was designed to operate with 5 volts, because i plan to use it for a future PC mod. Since the PC power supply has 5 volts output, and since the LEDs that i plan to use require 3.8 volts to operate, choosing 5 volts for supply was the best choice to minimize power dissipation on the transistor.

This circuit is usable as a Night Lamp when a wall mains socket is not available to plug-in an ever running small neon lamp device. In order to ensure minimum battery consumption, one 1.5V cell is used, and a simple voltage doubler drives a pulsating ultra-bright LED: current drawing is less than 500µA. An optional Photo resistor will switch-off the circuit in daylight or when room lamps illuminate, allowing further current economy. This device will run for about 3 months continuously on an ordinary AA sized cell or for around 6 months on an alkaline type cell but, adding the Photo resistor circuitry, running time will be doubled or, very likely, triplicated.

Here's a simple problem: "How do you make an LED turn on when it gets dark?" You might call it the "nightlight problem," but the same sort of question comes up in a lot of familiar situations-- emergency lights, street lights, silly computer keyboard backlights, and the list goes on. Solutions? Lots. The time-honored tradition is to use a circuit with a CdS photoresistor, sometimes called a photocell or LDR, for "light-dependent resistor." (Circuit Example 1, Example 2.) Photoresistors are reliable and cost about $1 each, but are going away because they contain cadmium, a toxic heavy metal whose use is increasingly regulated. There are many other solutions as well. Look here for some op-amp based photodetector circuits with LED output, and check out some of the tricks used in well-designed solar garden lights, which include gems like using the solar cell itself as the sensor.

I like the idea of using LED Christmas lights because they look cool and consume very small amount of electricity, but the flicker drives me crazy! That's because they are powered directly from 110V AC voltage instead DC voltage which makes them flicker 60 times per second. Here is a simple circuit that will completely eliminate LED Christmas lights flicker. The solution is to convert AC to DC voltage with resistor, rectifier diode and capacitor. Using 470 ohm - 1K resistor is very essential because it limits the current to 20mA and minimizes the voltage to about 80 volts. If we didn't use the resistor LEDs would be powered by over 50mA of current which is much more than what they need and that would definitely shorten their life. Note that lowering voltage does not reduce the brightness of the LEDs because when powered by DC voltage they are always on.

Two strips of LEDs fading in a complementary manner 9V Battery-operated portable unit. This circuit operates two LED strips in pulsing mode, i.e. one LED strip goes from off state, lights up gradually, then dims gradually, etc. while the other LED strip does the contrary. Each strip can be made up from 2 to 5 LEDs at 9V supply.

The idea of this project came from my youngest son. He was dreaming of a small tool able to write symbols or pictures on a screen. As a graphic LCD (even bought at Crownhill :) ) was too expensive (or too easy??), the solution adopted was to pilot a matrix of Leds. This way, with only some cheap transistors, common red Leds, and a 16F628 , the dream could become reality.

Here's a simple circuit that flashes an LED on and off. This circuit uses the 555 timer in an Astable operating mode which generates a continuous output via Pin 3 in the form of a square wave. This turns the LED (D1) on and off. The speed at which the LED (D1) is turned on and off is set by the values of R1 and R2.