I drew up what I think my circuit should look like today. I'm basically trying to flash LEDs using a transistor, and then power the transistors using a PIC. I'm going to be powering the whole thing off of 12V car power supply (lighter socket). I don't have any fancy circuit drawing programs to do this on, so I had to do it the old fashioned way, by hand on some graphing paper. Thanks in advance!
Transistors are the wrong way around c-e. Emitter to GND and led's + resistor in collector line.
Not a good idea to tie all the bases together. Each base should have its own resistor going to the PIC.
It's also very bad practice to put LED's in series!.
Try looking at my IR tutorial hardware, this shows how to drive LED's from a PIC - notice I use an NPN transistor, with the LED's in the positive rail.
Nigel made a typo, for better efficiency put more LED in seriel. Probably no need a stabilized voltage for LED section. For 7812 not enough 12V input for proper work.
Should have read "it's very bad practice to put LED's in PARALLEL".
Series is how they should be done, depending on the supply voltage available. If you parallel LED's you should use a seperate current limiting resistor for each series chain of LED's.
Should I go with that, or just get rid of the 7812? If so, should I power the LEDs off the 7805? Is that do-able? I imagine it would be, if I wired them in parallel... Thanks again guys.
I don't think I can run them in series, because of the fact that my voltage will not be able to supply them all at only 5v. What about if I ran them at 5v, on a parallel setup?
I was told that would run too hot. Man, this is starting to get hard. Does anybody have a concrete recommendation that I could just do? Let's say I want to run everything off of parallel circuit, what would I need to do to make this work?
I have 30 LEDs, running at 1.5 volts, with 100ma apiece. I have a 12v feed coming into a 7805 regulator, reducing it down to a 5v feed. How do I power the LEDs with transistors? Do I wire them in series or parallel?
30 LED parallel (100mA/LED) 3A! The 7805 can supply only 1A. The direct parallel connection not recommended, cannot find 5...15 LEDs with exactly same properties.
When You connect 6 LEDs seriel, need minimum 10V supply voltage, but only 100mA for 6 LEDs!
Build 5 of this group, need 0.5A for 30 LEDs, so the power lost 1/6.
As you may or may not know, automobile voltage is extremely irregular. It can spike anywhere from 13v to 16v in a matter of seconds. By using a 7812, I can step down the voltage to a constant 12v coming through, while it's not perfect, it should work for the circuit I'm building. Think of it as a really lazy man's line conditioner.