Pulse

As a consumer of all types of liquids sold by heartless multinationals, I discovered this week that a plastic Evian bottle cap mates perfectly with a Coke bottle cap to make a little enclosure. It occurred to me immediately, nerd that I am, that this would make a good project box for any really small electronics project. Not having any such projects in mind, I decided I would make something simple and useless, and what’s more useless than a flashing LED?

The circuit for a blinking light is pretty straightforward – it’s just a timer chip with an LED on the output. Except for the batteries (I used two 3V watch batteries taped together), I happened to have all the parts on hand: a 555 Timer chip (from a red box that I never built), 3 resistors, a capacitor, an LED, wires and some perfboard. This site has more info if you want to build your own. I just picked my own combination of resistors and cap that had a frequency around 2 Hz, then proceeded to do one of the worst soldering jobs ever, then cut up the perfboard so that it fits nice and snug inside the bottle cap. Now, I think it is time to listen to some Floyd.