I hope you worked all month on your 555 projects to meet up the deadline cause here is mine!

Name: Emergency S.O.S. Beacon

Lovely Codename: Bacon Beacon (There’s a story for this,it’s at the complete end of this page ;P )

Category: Utility

What it is (in short):

The Bacon Beacon or BB is meant to be  life saving device. When powered up by it’s 9V battery it emits a S.O.S. in morse code over the AM and (oddly enough) on the FM band. Since the range is to be kept short (1 mile) a search and rescue team could locate it using a simple radio and a directional antenna.

Here’s a demo for more “visual people” hehe:

1-You get lost.

Getting Lost

2-You activate the beacon.

Activating the beacon

3-Some granny listening to AM band pick up your distress signal,call the authorithy who set up a Search and Rescue team. (yeah,this is how it will happen =P )

Search and Rescue

4-The S&R team track you down and save your day.

Tracking you in the void

5-Hurray!

Hurray!

Now the more “in depth” stuff.

The device use 5 ne555 IC to complete it’s task.

The first one is named the Clock

It’s job is to turn on and off non-stop at a slow pace to switch between sending DOTS (.) and DASHES ( – )

The second and third one are on a higher frequency making the DOTS and the DASHES when turned on by the clock

The fourth one is bringing the output of our 2 last 555 together and generate a 1khz (or so) note we can hear.

The fifth one is the Xmitter,taking the sound from the fourth one and sending it over the airwaves (oh yeah, air waves).

Here’s a graph for more understanding:

Simulation of all 5 ne555

Now that the working principle is explained,here is the wiring diagram:

And now,here’s a 3D model of what the actual thing would look like:

Notice the “flashlight” ending.

It’s a bicolor visual beacon. Half of the leds are red to attrack attention when lost at night and the other half are Infrared for if you’re unlucky enough that a chopper is searching for you, well they use infrared cameras so you’d be like a star on the ground for them ( yep,a star) .

Now here is the breadboard version:

/!\ WARNING  /!\          your eyes might be hurt by such un-neatness (lol)      /!\ WARNING  /!\

The first thing that came to my mind,on pape.

Working Bacon Beacon on breadboard!

Working Bacon Beacon on breadboard!

And finally,the story of “Why the heck is this named a Bacon Beacon!?!?!?”

So since Fightcube helped me A LOT to troubleshoot and wire things up correctly,we talked a lot over IM. Since it was like 2 in the morning,we were both pretty tired and making jokes (jokes are good!). So Fightcube said:

” Hhaha,your device is meant to attrack people,and it’s named the Beacon Stick…wouldn’t it attract more people if it was simply a bacon slice on a stick!?!!”

So from this conversation I decided to name it the Bacon Beacon =P

Huge thanks to Fightcube,Icemanfiveoh,BadWolf Corp,Google,Ebay, and seeed studio for making such nifty tools like the DSO nano V2 (which I extensively used to troubleshoot this thing all around).

May the Hack be with you!

Bacon Booty