A neon light bulb and some scrap components can result in this interesting, very low power consumption decorative flasher. You can use it to decorate your room that will not be totally dark at night or put it into toys such as miniatures.
An important feature of this simple flasheris its low power consumption, less than 0.01 W, which means that even leaving it permanently on, there will be no noticeable increase in your energy bill.
In addition to the neon lamp, only three components are used and can be found in your scrap.
Operation:
What we have is a relaxation oscillator with neon lamp where resistor R1 and capacitor C1 determine the frequency of the blinks. The neon lamp only ionizes with something around 80 V of voltage, so the unit will only operate on the 110 V or 220 V network. You can change C1 to change the speed of the blinks as you wish.
Diode D1 has the function of supplying the direct current that carries the capacitor and keeps the oscillations.
Assembly:
In figure 1 we have the diagram of the apparatus.
In figure 2 we have its assembly on a terminal strip.
The D1 diode can be the 1N4004 for the 110 V grid and the 1N4007 for the 220 V grid. The 1 M resistor is not critical. If value, it can actually be between 470k and 2.2M.
For capacitor C1 we have several possibilities. A polyester 220nF to 1μF can be used with tension from 100V or old oil types from 0.1 to 0.47μF. In figure 3 we give a suggestion of box for assembly.
Material list
NE-1 - neon lamp
D1- 1N4004 (110V) or 1N4007 (220V) - silicon diode
C1- capacitor - see text
R1- 1 M - resistor (brown, black, green)
Miscellaneous:
Terminal strip, power cable, solder.
