On Fri, 26 Nov 2004 17:07:30 +0000, lupi wrote:

Any info on this? The 12v single water clear led's are $1.67 and put
out 11000 or 3300 mcd, whatever that is, some measure of how bright
they are. The viewing angle is 30 or 60 degrees. The attraction is
that current draw is almost nothing. I measured .023 amps for a single
lamp.
Also, I want to make an anchor light with 6 of the 60 degree lamps
flashing so fast they look like they are all on- kind of like the
moving pictures principle. A 555 timer chip, a capacitor, a current
limiting resistor? In theory this would still only drawn the current
of one lamp. Is any of this practical? Thanks again.

Well, if you want to multiplex 6 lamps, then you will need to have a
maximum duty cycle of 100/6 = ~18 % for each lamp.

While you can certainly flash LED's without losing any apparent
brightness (I think I've read that rapidly flashing LED's can subjectively
appear brighter to observers) you can't arbitrarily go down to low duty
cycles, and I think 18% is too low.

Still, maybe you should just build the circuit with one LED and see what
it looks like at an 18% duty cycle.

If you need help with the circuit, try one of these two newsgroups:

sci.electronics.basics
sci.electronics.design

--Mac