Simple NE555 Pulsing LED Breadboard

Here’s a simple pulsing LED circuit that I found online (by MrBeta)
I’ve made some virtually unnoticeable changes to how Mr Beta describes the circuit on his instructable, however, I hope that the photographs and video are more clear. I have had some trouble with this circuit and I’ve usually abandoned it after a couple of minutes.
This time, however, I persisted and worked it out.
Initially, I was after, pretty much exactly, this effect. A simple pulsing LED. The idea was to use this circuit within a Steam Punk prop (such as in a ray-gun). This component was going to be part of more LED jiggery pokery and I had moved on to achieving something similar as part of an overall Arduino controlled LED array (multiple LED doing various things simultaneously). Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about this circuit and, since I have a bunch of SO8 555 chips, I’d work on making this with SMT rather than through hole … another planned exercise for when my SMT LED and Resistors arrive (oh, and I’ll have to get some SMT transistors and capacitors).
The project requires:

• NE555
• 33k ohm resistor
• 470 ohm resistor
• 33 uF capacitor
• LED (I’ve used spooky green)
• 2N2222 NPN transistor

I’ve put this together on a solderless breadboard and photographed it from every angle and put some labels on the pictures to make it easier to reproduce.


And here is a video of the pulse. MrBeta used a 100uF capacitor, but that was a little bit too slow for what I wanted. The 33 uF capacitor gave me a much more satisfactory cycle.

Simple Ne555 pulsing LED

Anyway, that’s it for now. have fun!