I’m having a little trouble with the lights I put in the Neutrona Wand of my Proton Pack. I have a 9 Volt Battery powering four LEDs installed in parallel into a breadboard with a 100 ohm resistor in each branch. 3 of the LEDs are powered by a flip switch, and a blinking LED is activated separately with a Push Button. It looks something like the picture below…
The thing is, after switching the lights on and off a few times: they start to dim, power on very slowly, or stay off altogether. I’m using a fully charged rechargeable battery when this happens. So, I’d just like to know if anyone can give me a few tips with my little problem here.
Do I need another component to stop the LEDs from sucking up so much energy, like a capacitor?
Should I use bigger resistors?
Is there a wiring diagram/schematic made specifically for the Wand Lights I haven’t seen yet?
At 100 ohms, you’re consuming 90mA per LED (or 360mA if all are on).
Nine volt batteries have a mAh rating of around 400 to 500. A cheap rechargeable NiCd or NiMH will only get you 300 mAh.
Assuming you have a very fresh non-rechargeable battery, you’re only going to get an hour and a half out of this circuit as it’s currently designed. If you’re using a cheap rechargeable, it can be quite a bit less than this.
I would suggest you increase the resistor values to at least 1 to 10 kOhm. They won’t be as bright but you shouldn’t notice a big difference. The other thing you could do is use 6 AA batteries in series instead. This would boost your mAh rating considerably compared to a single 9V.
Also for future reference, a capacitor will act as an open circuit with DC voltages so they won’t provide any sort of performance increase.
