Works on the flickered light circuit
--By Jianqiao Xiao
Sept 27–Oct 3
With our experience in Lab 5 this week, we try to simplify the design of the flickered light part of our light system. What we did in Lab was to create a time-varying current with relatively high frequency. As we can adjust the frequency by changing the R value and C value, we can make it applicable in our light system. By flickering in the period of 1 sec or 1.2 sec, the light will be visible and sensitive to human eyes. However, we still need to adjust the duty cycle for a little bit since the 50% duty cycle would be too much to accomplish our goal–consuming too much electrical energy. Because our light system will be powered by normal batteries, we need the lighting time to be as little as possible and avoiding useless work so that we don't have to change batteries every day! TA mentioned a little bit of the change of duty cycle in class and suggested that we need two resistors with different values and two diodes to limit a one-way flow of charges. By connecting them in parallel, we could actually manage the duty cycle of the current. We tried it and succeeded in changing the duty cycle with additional diodes and resistors. The following are the circuits we built for the first "draft" of the flickered light system. There is also a schematics of the circuit which indicate our current selection of duty cycle. But we will still make decisions on the duty cycle we will choose based on the test of the light's visibility.
--Our circuit schematic for the first experiment of the flickered lights
--Attempts to build a real circuit based on the schematic
