Multi Color Lighting

The multi color lighting circuit describe below can be used to decorate your house or your temple with light of different colors and this will not use electricity but solar energy. We can use solar charger in the range of 9V – 12V. The circuit is built around the CD4060 and few more components. IC CD4060 is 14 stage ripple carry binary counter, divider and an oscillator. Its built in oscillator is main feature of this IC that’s why it can be used in numerous application like flasher, clock generator in timer circuits.

Here IC1 is working as frequency dividing circuit. In this internal oscillator stage is made using resistor and capacitor which can be connected to pin 11, 10 and 9. Here capacitor is connected to pin 9 and pin 11 and 10 are connected to a resistor.

IC CD4060 is wired such that its outputs Q4, Q5, Q6 and Q7 are used for color display. When you switch on the power supply these output go high simultaneously but for different duration of time. Like Q4 output goes high for about 3 seconds, similarly Q5 go high for about 5 seconds and Q6 and Q7 output goes high for about 15 seconds and 20 seconds respectively. The output is connected to 24 LED’s through transistor T1, T2, T3 and T4. A combination of different colors results due to switching on of transistors T1 to T4 for different time durations. We have used transistor to BC547 to boost the current as LED’s are connected in parallel. To make the display look colorful, different color LED are used. In this experiment, LEDs used are: Red at Q4, Green at Q5, Blue at Q6 and Yellow at Q7

If you want to reduce the time duration for which output goes high, replace 100K resistor with smaller value like 68K. If you want to increase the time, replace 120K resistor with higher value like 150K or you can do hit and trial to get the desire value.

We have connected to pin 12 (reset input) to ground with a capacitor and resistor because when power is applied it initially behaviors as a short and prevents the IC from getting a ground potential through the resistor. Within a few milliseconds, the capacitor charges and makes the pin potential to ground level. This ensures that the IC initiates the counting from zero so that we will get regular time period making the result more reliable.

Power supply for IC is provided with solar charger as shown in circuit diagram. This solar energy is converted into electrical energy and store in the battery connected to it. During day time you can charge the battery through solar charger. You can also 9V battery instead of solar charger.