Wiring & Testing a 555 Timer Circuit

Building a 555 timer circuit may seem rather boring in comparison to dragons and plasma, but it’s the most important part of this project.

For the plasma ball component of our build we’re going to convert an ordinary incandescent light bulb into a plasma globe. But just running high voltage through it with an ignition coil (or other high voltage source) won’t produce any visual effects so we’ll have to fine-tune the frequency using our 555 timer to be in resonance with the coil and then the plasma streams will show up

Using a wiring diagram as a guide, we’ll connect all the components and use an LED as a visual frequency indicator to be sure our circuit is working properly. Then we’ll see how swapping in different capacitors, resistors and even a potentiometer affects the results.

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