Sequencing LED's


Sequencing LED's can give your vehicle be it a car or a bike or for that matter your house a beautiful effect. DAV electronics is a leading manufacturer of LED's. They have manufactured a sequencer which allows one to wire up as many as 20 LED's. This sequencer is capable of two modes of operation, one being the chasing mode and the other, the sequencing mode. The sequencing is done in an order and after the full row of LED's have lighted up they go off in the reverse order i. e. they sequence backwards till they all go off to start again. Whereas, chasing LED's work in an entirely different way. They are formed in to groups of four or five each consisting of approximately 10 to 12 LED's. And when the first one in one group lights up so does the first in the second group and the same happens in the third group and fourth. This is followed by the second of each group and so on.

Before I go further, a word about LED's. LED's are Light Emitting Diode. How is light emitted by this diode? What is a diode? A diode comprises of two semi conductors placed near each other and connected to the terminals of a power supply. The flow of electrons causes a light to light up the gap. This is called the light emitting diode. This light produced is not due to the heating up of any filament; hence you can term this as a cool light. As this is a cool light it has no filament to burn out. So life is longer compared to the standard bulb. This arrangement of the semi conductors conducts current in only one direction. So connecting LED's should be done carefully. This would suffice you to know about LED's in this context.

Another way in which sequencing LED's work is that there are different colored LED's like red green and blue. These LED's when sequenced are able to produce images. There was once an event conducted at Redmond which was conducted exclusively for the employees of Microsoft. At the event miniaturized LED's were sequenced in such a way on a chip that they produced a terrific effect. The sequenced LED's were of the color red, green and blue only. They were sequenced in such a way to produce full color images.

Sequencing LED's are a simple process. All you need to do is to wire them up and connect them to a sequencer. The sequencer is a small circuit board with it resistors and a four way switch. This allows the sequencing of the LED's. Generally every sequencer is built for 10 or 12 array of LED's. If you want to connect more than those 10 LED's to a single sequencer, then it is advisable to connect two LED's in one wire. Anything more than this needs to be custom built. The custom built version is used for lighting up advertisement hoardings and out door display purposes.