Alternating 3 LED project

Question

I am making a Halloween costume for my son and it needs some light. Basically he's a character from the Mario Bros universe that carries a traffic light on a fishing pole (Lakitu in Mario Kart). I am trying to figure out a way to light the traffic lights red, green, and yellow lights using leds in a single circuit that would turn them on and off independently. Just something simple that goes red, then yellow, then green, then back to red over and over. Is there something to build or a circuit diagram? I really have never done any wiring like this ever, so the easier the better. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

This is very simple LED chaser circuit

Use a 74HC4017 for more drive current.

What you do is use multiple LEDs for each color.
Only one will be on at any given time.

LED1-4 Red
LED5-6 Yellow
LED7-10 Green

You could do something more like this:

Yellow 1 LED 1-2
Yellow 2 LED 3-4
Yellow 3 LED 5-6
Green LED 7-10

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If you want high driver current add a buffer driver or inverting buffer

Answer 2

Here's one that's a bit of trouble to make.

Figure 1. Source: MarvinSafe.

Instead, I recommend that you make a manually switched circuit with a 4-way slide switch. This could easily be mounted in the pole of the lights.

Figure 2. A 4-way slide switch. This one is dual-pole: the near set of contacts and far set of contacts are duplicates. We only need on set for this project.

^{simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab}

Figure 2. A thumb-operated 4-way slide-switch wiring.

The current requirement depends on your LEDs. When you buy them figure out what their rated current is and you can calculate the appropriate value for R1 using many of the online calculators. For some theory see my article Ohm's law and resistor calculation.

If you need more LEDs for brightness then connect them in parallel. Usually this is a bad idea but for this simple temporary application it would be fine.