As I said in the first post, I have a moth-like draw to blinking lights. It’s not just blinking lights; More specifically, it’s industrial & scientific control panels & user interfaces from the mid 20th century. They were chock with gauges, dials, knobs, buttons, levers, switches, lights (both blinking and steady), and all manor of diverse & clever information display technologies.
But lets start with blinking lights. There are quite a lot of ways to perform the seemingly simple task of blinking a light, and over the next 50 days, I’m going to explore a bunch of them.
Here’s my first stab at outlining these methods. It’s no way exhaustive, and I’m not going to get to all of them:
- Electromechanical
- flasher relays
- flasher bulbs
- mechanical chasers
- Electronic
- harmonic oscillator
- relaxation oscillator
- multivibrator
- 555 timer IC
- Microcontroller – C & Assembly
- Dumb loop
- Timer interrupts
- Computer controlled – higher level languages
- C / C++
- Python
- Max/MSP / Puredata