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Help with circuit diagram please

Hi

I have a slightly unusual project I wonder if someone can help with. I need to customise a guitar to include 20 4.8v 3A torch batteries. They will be powered by 2 4.5V Alkaline batteries, the tricky bit is that i need the lights to flash on and off in groups of 4 or 5. Basically I think i am looking at having 4 or 5 loops of lights presumambly in serial, connected to 4 or 5 channels. What I am lacking is a simple controller to switch channels on a timer (once per second would be about right)

I think the controller itself should be relatively simple but I don't know how to design it. Can anyone email me a basic diagram and list of components i would require? The 2 principle considerations are that it would need to be basic as I am not an electrician, and secondly that it would be fairly compact as it needs to fit in a guitar.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Trevor

Reply to
Ace
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Link us to these 20) 4.8V 3A batteries! That sounds real strange. I don't think you're communicating well enough. 4 or 5 channels running 4 or 5 lights... simultaneously or sequentially? What does each channel do? Does each channel respond to a different frequency range or do these groups of lamps simply turn on one channel after another at a 1Hz rate?

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Reply to
Lord Garth

Sorry my mistake. the bulbs are 4.8v 3A. There are 20 lights I want to install on the guitar, my idea is to have a 4 or 5 channel controller, each channel operating a group of 4 or 5 lights so that a different group of lights flashes on every 1 second. The lights would only need to operate for 5-10 minutes so battery life shouldn't be a major concern.

I hope this calarifies

Reply to
Ace

Much better, thanks...

My first suggestion would be to substitute high brightness white LEDs for the (I think) incandescent bulbs. First, LEDs are more reliable and use far less current which makes them easier to use with electronic switching.

What sort of power source do you have available? It would help to have the type of battery, its chemistry and its approximate mAH rating. If you use an array of batteries, the final voltage needs to be known as well.

The basic circuit would be a 555 oscillator outputting a 1Hz pulse followed by a divide by 4 or 5 counter and then a decoder. This basic circuit has several places where it can be made better / different. For instance, the counter / decoder could be replaced with a cheap micro which has been programmed to walk an output exclusively among 5 outputs or the counter / decoder could be replaced with a simple shift register where the final output is looped back to its input. You just have to power up setting one stage while resetting the others. All are easy to build but I suspect wiring the guitar will be more difficult.

What all of these three possibilities have in common is the need for a final driver to actually fire the lamps. If you decide to lose the incandescent lamps and go with the LEDs, so much the better.

The lamps should be connected such that the wiring is minimized. 5 lamps in

5 groups means 10 wires so I suppose it's good that you want each groups lamps all on at the same time.
Reply to
Lord Garth

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