Help with circuit diagram please

[Ace]

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

 

[Lord Garth]

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

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?

 

[Ace]

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

 

[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

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.