am I in the right place?

[Flyndad123]

Is this the place to discuss what I believe to be a super, super simple led light and switch idea?

 

[Flyndad123]

If so here goes:

I have a line of individual Blue led lights.

Parallel to this line is a line of red led lights.

Parallel to the red is another line of purple.

and next to that is a line of orange.

I want to have 2 VERY small "buttons". One button would be "increase", and the other "button" would be decrease. OR + and - respectively.

Then, I want to have another single "button" that when pressed, selects which line of led lights gets increased or decreased.

so: you press a "button" that scroll through the various lines of led lights and when you are on the line you want to increase or decrease, you press the + or - "buttons".

This is very simple no? I am totally ignorant about electronic components, and hope this isn't complicated for an electronics buff.

Ohh,. it should run off a "normal" type battery and will need a simple on/off switch as well,..

Any ideas on what components I need to try and put this together and how they would connect together?

 

[donkey]

ok welcome to EP.
what I think you are trying to do requires 4ish buttons. I am thinking the + and - as you describe an on/off as you describe and a 4th to scroll through the columns of LED's.
no comes the fun part how many LED's you looking at?
to control this you would try a microcontroller. Arduino, or pic or any other that you are willing to program.
hope this gives you a start, just google arduino and have a look at the start stuff.
also when you say a typical battery that doesn't mean much. the batteries you may be referring to are AA, AAA, C, D and 9volt. now the arduino will take 9volts but the 9volt battery will not last long. so it comes down to how big you want the unit to be as well

 

[BobK]

This project is fairly simple for someone well versed in microcontroller programming. Without a microcontroller it would be a quite advanced project, needing on the order of 10 or more logic chips. In fact, I am not even sure how one would go about it without a microcontroller.

Basically, to dim LEDs you want to use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), which means you turn the LEDs on and off say 100 times per second, the % of that time period that it is on determines how bright it looks. At 100 times per second, it does not look like it is blinking because they eye is not that fast. The % of time on is called the duty cycle. It can go from 0% (off) to 100% (fully on).

In addition to doing the dimming, the microcontroller would have to monitor the buttons and respond to them. For an experienced programmer, this is easy, for someone who has done no programming or electronics it would be quite a learning curve.

If you want to pursue this, people will help you here on the forum, but don't expect it to be a weekend project!

Bob

 

[donkey]

is the OP after dimming? or is he/she after the ability to make lights go on/off in a line?
The way I read it it looks like its a line of LED's that he wants to turn on and off each one individually. so that you have a row of 5 LED's and the bottom 3 are on pressing the + - buttons will make the fourth turn on or the third turn off.

 

[BobK]

Ah, you might be right. It was not clear in the OP.

Bob

 

[sirch]

I assumed by "increase" and "decrease" he meant dimming but you could be right Donkey. If that's the case it might be possible with shift registers, depends whether they mind multiple button presses to get the right configuration