hi all, i am installing some custom lighting in my car, pretty simple. But simple is never enough, so in addition to installing LED's all over my interior, i wanted to be able to have them blink, and fade in and out, as well as illuminate as they normally would. i have a basic (highschool) level of understanding circuitry. If anyone could please help me gain a better understanding of how to accomplish this, it would be greatly appreciated.
thank you, mark
On principle, I regret I couldn't possibly help you. You're not asian btw are you ?
Graham
Pitiful some of the replies fron this group.
AS with any design project you have to figure out what you want it to do and how you want to control it.
Do you want just switches to select between blinking, dimming, full on? how do you want them to blink? chasing lights (hard) all together (ugly but easy), half on half off, not bad, with the music, not too bad either.
Next time, it would help if you used a more appropiate title - such as
"Controlling brigtness, fading and blinking of LEDs"
I can imagine no matter what you do with this, you will always think of ways it would be better (i.e. if they stayed on longer, got brigther more slowly, had a random pattern etc). In this case, a PIC chip that you program would be ideal. If you don't like the pattern you get, just reprogram it.
If you switch an LED on off quickly (say 100Hz), then it will appear to be on all the time. Use 1kHz and then by varing the ratio of time on to time off, you could easily get any change with time you wanted. e.g. to get 25% brightness, you would have it on for 1ms, off for 3ms, on for
1ms, off for 3ms, on for 1ms, off for 3ms.Take the output pin of the PIC to a FET to handle the power. i.e. source of FET is at ground, you drive the gate, have the LEDs cathode on the drain and the LEDs anode on the +12V supply, with a suitable current limiting resistor.
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