Led At Home DIY Electronics

Driving an LED from a 5v microcontroller is no problem. Flashing a red, blue, green or yellow LED should be possible even with a microconroller running at 3v but what if you want to drive a white LED that doesn't strart to illuminate until it's voltage gets to about 3.1v?

Worse still what if you are designing a battery operated device and you wanted to squeeze every last second of juice from the battery by allowing the voltage to drop to the minimum the microcontroller will work at? This would be 1.8v in the case of an Arduino chip which is way short of a glowing white LED. The solution is to add a voltage multiplier to the controller output driving the LED. More...

How to build an LED bargraph display using transistor drivers where the number of LEDs illuminated is determined by the input voltage to the circuit. This circuit can be used to indicate temperature or water level or anything that can be converted to a voltage level.

There are a number of integrated circuits and modules available that are designed specifically for led bar graphs but if your junk box looks like mine then you probably don't have one. What if you want to build a bar graph today and don't have the right chip? I always have a small stock of transistors, diodes and resistors to hand just like most other hobbyists. So if I can build something out of these basic components then I can get the circuit working in an hour or two. Why don't you give this one a try. More...