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General => Contests & Events => Topic started by: jolshefsky on February 22, 2018, 07:04:22 pm

Title: Flashing Light Prize 2018—EEVBlog Member Entries
Post by: jolshefsky on February 22, 2018, 07:04:22 pm

The Flashing Light Prize 2018 (https://www.flashinglightprize.com/) concludes accepting entries on March 15, 2018. From their site:

Quote

The Flashing Light Prize is an informal and fun contest to find the most ingenious & unusual way of flashing a bulb, tube or other vessel that contains neon gas.

I'll post my entry below ... who else has 20 hours to kill editing video?  ;D

Title: Re: Flashing Light Prize 2018—EEVBlog Member Entries
Post by: jolshefsky on February 22, 2018, 07:08:45 pm

As promised, here's my entry:
https://youtu.be/fL0nbPd7dcU

I'm feeding a 59Hz sine wave at about 12VRMS into the neutral side of a neon-resistor circuit tied to a voltage divider across U.S. mains 120VAC at 60Hz. It's being directly driven by the output of an op-amp with a ground common to mains neutral. By setting a voltage divider on the mains to right around the neon bulb's strike voltage, the 1 Hz frequency component of the summed waves makes the bulb turn on and off.

(Also, this is my first video uploaded that I seriously shot and edited, so yay for that.)

Title: Re: Flashing Light Prize 2018—EEVBlog Member Entries
Post by: NiHaoMike on February 24, 2018, 05:35:53 am

There are various ways to flash all kinds of lights with a smartphone, but how many of those will work with a broken smartphone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbpwIO3fwxY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbpwIO3fwxY)