ideas on how i can make my lights oscillate on my car

[MrDudeMan]

i have an '83 S-10 blazer, it is my pride and joy

i have 8 lights on it total, and i want to know how to make them oscillate like chaser lights....like christmas lights i guess

my car looks is like this...

_0_0_0_0_

this is a roof rack with 4 offroad lights
this is on top of my car (obviously)
i have them on an isolated switch



x__t__t___x

this is a diagram of my headlights (the x's) and two other offroading lights (the t's)



each set is on its own switch, so i can turn on any combination of x, t, and 0

what i am asking is....how can i make it "chase" the light ahead of it and make it work like an oscillator like on christmas lights, like i stated before

basically what i mean is, starting from the left headlight to the right headlight, then up to the top right 0 to the top left 0, and keep that going in a redundancy

so x -> t -> t ->x ->0 -> 0 -> 0 -> 0 -> start over


any help would be appreciated

 

[Yossarian451]

I apolgize because I can't remember much of the electronics I once knew or tired to know, I was self-taught and have lost most of it. But a quick thing which comes to mind, which is using a series of flip-flop style circuits nest them se they work in the chaser effect. Have this circuit control the switches which would have to be physically installed in each of the lines to the lights. I am not very knowledgeable but this does come to mind as a solution. Someone with more expertise will be able to help but that is my plan. Good Luck.

 

[jasonja]

okay all you EE wannabee's, everyone of you has access to microcontrollers in your labs at college (if not, your school sucks, transfer now . Someone write him a simple program on a 8051 w/ a ROM and he can hook up some relays to the output pins of the 8051 to do this.

 

[MrDudeMan]

yeah, what jason said!


anyone have any information on this? i would be willing to pay a few $$$ for your time and effort

 

[blahblah99]

You don't even need a microcontroller to do that... a binary counter, 555 timer, and a few relays (or transistors if you dont like the "clicking" of the relays) should do the trick..

 

[jasonja]

Yup, there's tons of ways to solve this... I'm a software guy, I like the microcontrollers since it's really easy to fix software bugs and extremely flexible should you later want to change it.

Here's someone chaser lights project... just needs to be altered a bit and needs a clock Link!

 

[MrDudeMan]

i got a local EE to help me out! he made this extremely complex circuit to make it do all sorts of neat stuff.

we are going to make it variable speed, different controls, different patterns, etc.


we just put a big MUX (multiplexor) in the middle, a 555 timer, a digital control switch, a ST DP switch, and some LED's over the breadboard that do the same pattern the lights do

this is going to be great, ill post a movie clip once the final project is complete!

thanks for the input guys, and thanks jason for getting me started