Friday, June 5, 2015

Annoying Beeping Prank Circuit

Since i quit my old job last week, and I had the last day more or less alone in the office, I made a few loving pranks on my coworkers. One of them was a simple circuit based on a 555 timer. The circuit is simply a pulse oscillator with a couple of minutes between pulses. The circuit is seen here:
556 Pulse oscillator
The 1M Ohm resistor sets outputs high time together with the capacitor. The 100 Ohm resistor and capacitor sets the low time. This setup gives the inverse output of what I wanted to drive the buzzer (should be any buzzer with internal oscillator that can be driven by 9V), but it needed to be that way to keep power consumption low. If the resistors where swapped, the DIS-pin would discharge the power rail through the 100 Ohm resistor instead of the capacitor. To invert the output i used a second 555 as an inverter. In this configuration the circuit drew 8mA, which would give a couple of days use with a 9V, 580mAh battery.
Google told  me there was a CMOS-based low power version of the chip, TLC556. That chip was pin compatible and used up 0.3mA. This gave a run time of about 80 days which I was very happy with.
The circuit simply gave a short, loud beep every few minutes. I hid it in my colleagues flower pot and it took him quite a while to find it.. ;)
Implemented circuit