Jacob Ertel
Check my website for more details and snarky commentary. https://jacobertel.com/two-timer-flasher-circuit/
This circuit was made for Hackaday’s One Hertz Challenge. The challenge is to make something turn on and off once a second. Why would you want something to turn on and off once a second? I dunno. Maybe you’re just a poor little controls engineer working at a factory and your boss wants you to make a light blink when a machine isn’t working.
How would you do it?
Well if you wanted to earn brownie points with the older timers, you could use a 555 timer. But I don’t know how to do this. Maybe I did something like this back in undergrad. I forget.
If you wanted to be super precise you could synchronize a clock from GPS satellites orbiting the sky with a u-blox ZED-F9T. Sparkfun has a dev board for three Benjamins. This could get you down to 5 nanoseconds accuracy.
But remember, you’re just a lowly controls engineer. You don’t have time to design a 555 circuit, and your boss don’t care ’bout no nanoseconds. You have access to industrial control parts from the likes of Rockwell Automation, Siemens, and Square D. McMaster Carr, Grainger, and Automation Direct are also great places to look.
Your basic building block is a relay.
We can use two on-delay timers to make a light flash.
Adam Sifounakis
Chris
Dylan Brophy
sarah boo
As a fellow industrial control engineer, I love this entry. And I agree - I have always been amazed of the serviceability of the relays of the "past". We still have some 200 ton presses with old 1960's era AB relays clunking along. Why replace them when they still work? The manufacturer's solution to the problem is to mark up replacement parts by a factor of 20!