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Daylight harvesting is becoming increasingly important in the design and implementation of commercial lighting systems. Being able to integrate the natural light from windows with flexible, controllable sources of lighting helps improve the work environment and cut energy bills. Being able to have closer control of the lighting systems in a commercial environment is a key element to this strategy and energy harvesting can play an important role. Being able to have flexible placement of control pads for a commercial lighting system is an important requirement as office space is regularly reconfigured as existing clients grow and change their requirements and new clients have new requirements. [ ]

This circuit provides aircraft modellers with extremely realistic beacon and marker lights at minimum  outlay. The project ’s Strobe out-put (A) provides four brief pulses repeated periodically for the wing  (white strobe) lights. In addition the Beacon output (B) gives a double pulse to drive a red LED for indicating the aircraft’s active operational status. On the proto-type this is usually a red rotating  beacon known as an Anti-Collision Light (ACL). The circuit is equally useful for road vehicle modellers, who can use it to flash headlights and blue emergency lights.  Circuit diagram : Lighting Up Model Aircraft Circuit Diagram All signals are generated by a 4060 14-stage binary counter and some minimal output selection logic. Cycle time is determined by the way the internal oscillator is con-figured (resistor and capacitor on pins 9/10) and can be varied within quite broad limits. High-efficiency LEDs are your first choice for the indicators connected to the B...

This circuit is very handy as a timer circuit for a lamp, for lighting a staircase, for example, but can also be used as indicator for the front doorbell. A significant advantage of this circuit is that the circuit draws almost no current when in the inactive state. The circuit is activated with push button (S1), after which IC5 (a 555 timer IC) starts to count down the set time. During this  time the triac continues to conduct and the lamp is turned on. The ‘on’ time of the  lamp is on is determined by the combination of R1 and C2 and can be changed as  required by your application or personal  preference. R2 and C3 have been added because the  555 expects a ‘negative’ pulse at its trigger  input. When the power supply is turned on,  C3 holds the TR input of the 555 Low for a short time, which triggers the timer IC. Circuit diagram : Lighting Governor Circuit Diagram Depending on the exact type (brand) of  555, the value of C4 (330 nF) may have to be changed to ensure a high enou...

More and more people are using a PC (conventional or notebook) to view films. The VGA output can be used to provide a matching ‘Ambilight’ effect for this. If you restrict your-self to a single RGB LED, you can also draw the power for this circuit from the VGA connector, along with the RGB signals.  The following pins of the 15-way VGA connector (three rows of five pins) are used for  this circuit:  Pin 1:  Red video signal Pin 2:  Green video signal Pin 3:  Blue video signal Pin 5:  GND Pin 9:  +5 V  The video signals for the red, green and  blue channels are available at the RGB out-puts. These signals have an amplitude of 1 to 1.35 V, and they output the screen imagery at the rate of dozens of frames per second. This produces the visible image on the screen. The circuit described here drives an RGB LED according to the average values of each of these three signals. Of course, this is not a full-fledged ‘Ambilight’ system, but the RGB ...