Arun Has A Blog

This year for Valentine’s Day I decided to get nerdy and make something electronic for Caroline. I first tried to make a animated LED heart with a “joule thief” and a single AA battery, but I couldn’t make a suitable air coil. So, I decided to modify this circuit to make a throbbing LED heart. The circuit uses a 555 timer, NPN transistor, 12 LEDs, a capacitor, and two resistors. The schematic is below. I only drew in 6 LEDs in parallel, but there should be 12.

This is what the finished product looks like:

And a video of it in action:

Wednesday was awesome. Classes were cancelled for most of us. So, we went sledding, built a fort and played all day in Riverside Park. I tried taking a lot of photos, but my camera was getting wet from the snow. Here are the few I did take.

Caroline, Sean, and Meixin trekking through the snow.

Some of the sledding slopes.

I was walking through the stairwell in Schapiro and noticed the light from a window hitting a red pipe. I ran back and snapped a few shots with my 30D and 30mm f/1.4.

I thought  that my last post was funny enough that I would post it up on Reddit last night. Little did I know that people would actually read the whole thing and upvote it. This is what I saw when I checked Reddit today.

I quickly checked my site’s stats and there was a massive spike in my daily hits.

Not only did the today’s hits eclipse that of any other day. They also increased the total hits to my site by 50%. I never would have believed that my site would ever get that kind of traffic. Now to just maintain that… just kidding. Since this is my personal blog, I prefer the 30-100 hits per day I was getting before.