My electronics experimentation has brought a couple of comments from people I’ve met who have much greater experience and knowledge than I. For instance, in response to my posting of a schematic for flashing a rather large, powerful LED yesterday, I drew the attention of Mike Colishaw on Twitter:

And of course, Mike is absolutely 100% correct. The circuit that I posted is inexcusably inefficient. But of course, I have an excuse (a couple in fact).

First of all, there is the relatively lame “everybody does it.” If you go to section 7.3 of the Arduino Cookbook, you’ll see this exact circuit, with nary a mention of the relatively silly amounts of power wasted. I’d submit that in many battery powered applications, the power wasted by driving even ordinary LEDs this way can be quite large, and techniques to drive them more efficiently should be better known. Mike’s circuit is for a spelunker’s light, so battery life is obviously very, very important, and yet the overall circuit is pretty simple. Worthy of your (and my) study. When I get back to working on my light based communication experiments, I’ll want to make sure I’m driving these powerful LEDs efficiently, so I’ll be studying this stuff a lot harder.

My second excuse is one of simple expediency: Halloween is just a few days away, and I wanted to get this working. Doing a better job would require more parts, and probably parts I don’t have in my junk bin.

I’ll unveil the (very simple) project that this tinkering is a part of shortly. Stay tuned.

Addendum: I just learned about the Twitter Blackbird Pie plugin which allows you to embed tweets into WordPress plugins.   Very nice little gadget, and I’ll be using it more in the future.