Flashing LED's

[walkercreations]

I know many of you are thinking this is probably the simplest of anything robot electronics can do but hear me out. What I am wanting to do is make a programmable stand-alone board that has blinking LED's at preset patterns. My reason is that I want to make them for radio controlled aircraft. My problem is, I don't know how or what to use to accomplish this task. Is there anyone knowledgeable that could help walk me through the design and implementation of this?

[T0110100101101101K]

What do you mean by preset patterns?  
I am thinking that you may want to try using something simple like a 2 transistor astable multivibrator.   Check out this library of circuits http://www.reprise.com/host/circuits/transistor_flasher.asp

You could also use a 555 timer.  Is a 9V battery too heavy for your application?  This leads to adding more LEDs through a CD4017 counter.  There are many designs available if you search those two ICs together with LED.

[walkercreations]

Adapting it for Radio Control applications, I would like to provide power to the circuit via the device battery. By preset patterns I mean like in a real aircraft how you have some lights that are set on say a 1 flash per 3 seconds or some lights that act as strobes flashing many times per second.

[blackbeard]

Adapting it for Radio Control applications, I would like to provide power to the circuit via the device battery. By preset patterns I mean like in a real aircraft how you have some lights that are set on say a 1 flash per 3 seconds or some lights that act as strobes flashing many times per second.

I'd use a 74hc14 based shmidtt trigger oscillator if you can afford a couple extra grams of weight. It runs on 5v and the chip has 8 NOT gates you can use for verious blinks by using a different capacitor and a resistor on each. If you want to save pins on your micro you can use a mux so you only use 3 pins on your micro

[Soeren]

Hi,

[...] My problem is, I don't know how or what to use to accomplish this task. Is there anyone knowledgeable that could help walk me through the design and implementation of this?

PIC10F2xx would be my choice.

Atmel has finally made a size equivalent if you're more into AVR, it's the Tiny10.