For Halloween, I had wired the bushes in front of my house with
a dozen or so pairs of blinking LED eyes. Each pair of eyes
blinked at their own rate–all powered by an Arduino. After
building these centrally-wired daemonic bush entities I wanted
to be able to deploy a few more in remote bushes and trees
without having to wire them up to an Arduino. So I turned to my
good friend the 555 timer chip. 555 timers for the uninitiated
are a very versatile integrated circuit that can be used in a
variety of timer-related circuits. I was looking to achieve a
very specific blinking pattern and was having a hard time
figuring out the optimal set of components to use. There are
tons of calculators out there for figuring out the
characteristics of a 555 circuit based on the values of the
components you use. If you’ve ever tried using one of these
calculators for this sort of project it can be very frustrating.
I don’t actually care what the components’ values are; I’m
usually not thinking about that side of the equations