Simple POV Blinking Leds

The nice people of Jameco (www.jameco.com) send us a box full of components.  The omnipresent 555 was there, and so a bunch of leds.  Lets make some blinking ligths then!

Here you can download the fritzing file for the circuit.  Its just a simple oscillator with a 555 in astable configuration, the output square wave turns on and off two leds.  The frequency is given by the capacitor between legs 1 and 2, so changing the capacitor values changes the frequency the leds turn on, experiment and choose the one you like the most.  Here we try that the leds change its frequency at a high rate, so when the circuit is put to spin it sees like a continuum. 

Once you are happy with the freq of the blinking leds, you have to put the circuit to spin.  Here we use a fan made with lego motors by Alecu.  You can use a regular fan (be careful!), or make something similar with a motor and some gears.  Just make sure that the circuit is tigth and securely fixed to the fan blade, cause the spinning tends to spit things out at a really high speed!
Check the video to see what we are talking about.
Enjoy!