Made some very limited attempts at having a spring clean at home the other day and came across this lighting circuit I built, must be near on 10 years back now.

While there were, and still are, some very good commercial lighting kits out there they were well out of my pocket money limit. Many of the commercial units use pic chips that contain the flashing sequence in the form of "computer" code were as this board using cheap timing circuits with the flashing rates being fully changeable (faster or slower) using the on board potentiometers.

As I used to dabble with electronics years ago I had a go at building this from a circuit that was published on the internet. That internet site has long gone sadly but I still have the instructions for this one stored away somewhere.

The circuit is built up on something called VEROBOARD. Rather than being a printed circuit board its lots of strips of pierced copper that you link with jumper wires and cut certain tracks based on the plan you are using.

What was nice about this circuit is that for the price of some very basic components you get the following elements on the one board:

Ample static light points (each of the RED blanking jumpers can be removed to add additional static lights.

Flashing navigation lamps

Strobe circuit

and for the enterprise the swirling engine lights along with static and flashing navigation lamps. You could use a mix of colours for the engine lights to get a better effect.

The whole thing runs from 9 volts and while larger than some of the commercial offerings cost next to nothing other than time to build.

I have only just got used to adding pictures on this site but have tried to add my very first ever youtube video in case anyone is interested in seeing it working.

Hope you find it interesting.

https://youtu.be/5d_IzhWshSQ

https://youtu.be/03eNHMcTlCM