Flashing Light Prize 2018—EEVBlog Member Entries

[jolshefsky]

The Flashing Light Prize 2018 concludes accepting entries on March 15, 2018. From their site:

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? 

[jolshefsky]

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.)

[NiHaoMike]

There are various ways to flash all kinds of lights with a smartphone, but how many of those will work with a broken smartphone?