I was working on my LED dimmer/strobe circuit last night and..
Added 2020-09-21 21:36:50 +0000 UTCI was working on my LED dimmer/strobe circuit last night and I... blew up a 556. oops. The circuit works by making a 20kHz "triangle" wave and comparing it to a set voltage from the DIM potentiometer. This makes a PWM signal, which is buffered? by the transistors and fed to the gate of the MOSFET which turns the LEDs on and off. The OTHER side of the 556 is doing the same thing, but its speed is also adjustable, from ~0.5Hz to 30Hz. The output of its side of the comparator is connected to the DIM potentiometer, so it grounds the reference voltage, because it's an open collector. This turns off the dimmer entirely. BUT it seems to behave weirdly. If you have any suggestion, let me know? And yes, it would have been lots better to just use a MCU, BUT I wanted to see if I could actually make it work. AND YES I know there are online schematic drawing things but they pissed me off so I just did it by hand :P
