Circuit Wiring Solution

These are the little lights with the stake on the bottom that you can push into the ground along your driveway or sidewalk and have the solar panel on top. The solar cell charges a AA NiCd battery during the day and at night the battery powers the LED. The circuit board in this particular model was originally designed to hold a pair of 5mm amber LEDs, but the manufacturer apparently found a source of higher power 10mm amber LEDs and the final product only needs one of these. Due to the limited space, many of the components are surface mount. The transistors are both 2N3904 equivalent surface mounts. Unfortunately, the capacitor is also surface mount and is unmarked.

The charging circuit is fairly simple and has a photovoltaic solar cell to charge the battery and a diode to prevent the battery from powering the cell when it’s dark. Now moving along, there is a cadmium sulphide (CdS) photo resistor, a 10k resistor and a 1k resistor that forms a voltage divider at the base of Q1. When light hits the photo resistor, it has a low resistance which is amplified by the transistor. The collector is tied to the base of the left hand transistor, so when it’s on it clamps its base to ground and prevents it from oscillating. When it’s dark and the CdS Cell has a high resistance, the right transistor is off which allows the rest of the circuit to begin oscillating.

Light emitting diodes are advantageous due to their smaller size, low current consumption and catchy colours they emit. Here is a running message display schema wherein the letters formed by LED arrangement light up progressively. Once all the letters of the message have been lit up, the schema gets reset. The schema is built around Johnson decade counter CD4017BC (IC2). One of the IC CD4017BE’s features is its provision of ten fully decoded outputs, making the IC ideal for use in a whole range of sequencing operations.In the schema only one of the outputs remains high and the other outputs switch to high state successively on the arrival of each clock pulse.

Circuit diagram :

Running Message Display Circuit Diagram

The timer NE555 (IC1) is wired as a 1Hz astable multivibrator which clocks the IC2 for sequencing operations. On reset, output pin 3 goes high and drives transistor T7 to ‘on’ state. The output of transistor T7 is connected to letter ‘W’ of the LED word array (all LEDs of letter array are connected in parallel) and thus letter ‘W’ is illuminated. On arrival of first clock pulse, pin 3 goes low and pin 2 goes high. Transistor T6 conducts and letter ‘E’ lights up. The preceding letter ‘W’ also remains lighted because of forward biasing of transistor T7 via diode D21. In a similar fashion, on the arrival of each successive pulse, the other letters of the display are also illuminated and finally the complete word becomes visible. On the following clock pulse, pin 6 goes to logic 1 and resets the schema, and the sequence repeats itself. The frequency of sequencing operations is controlled with the help of potmeter VR1.

The display can be fixed on a veroboard of suitable size and connected to ground of a common supply (of 6V to 9V) while the anodes of LEDs are to be connected to emitters of transistors T1 through T7 as shown in the schema. The above schema is very versatile and can be wired with a large number of LEDs to make an LED fashion jewellery of any design. With two diagram connected in a similar fashion, multiplexing of LEDs can be done to give a moving display effect