Small Footprint Single Pulse 500ms per minute LED 3.3v

led

I'm quite new to electronics, so hopefully I don't offend anyone by asking a question badly.

I'd like to make a circuit that uses a CR2032 (3v) button cell to pulse an LED (3mm blue clear super bright – forward voltage +-3.3v) for half a second, once per minute.
The half-second part is quite important to me (1 second would be far too long), but the minute portion of the time scale is of less relevance (It could pulse once every 55 seconds for example, and that would be fine).

I'd like the final build to be as small as possible (in terms of form factor) and ideally to use analog components (best case) to keep the build cost-effective.
At a stretch, I would also be happy to use something like a 555 timer, but as I understand it, its no simple task to have the LED spend more time off than it does on when using 555's, because of how they work.

Given the size, cost and voltage constraints, what direction should I be looking in to get started ?

Best Answer

An absolutely minimalistic solution is to drive a microcontroller from the button cell, and use a simple bootstrap circuit to drive the LED:

schematic

simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab

You can program the MCU - represented by the dotted rectangle in the above diagram - to idle in power-save mode 55.5 seconds of each minute, and to toggle its output pin using PWM for the remaining 0.5 seconds. The PWM waveform on the base of C1 provides pulses of boosted current through the LED, D2, lighting it up.

If the LED's forward voltage is sufficiently low it glows dimly even when off, you may want to drive the anode of D1 from another IO pin so you can shut it off entirely when not in use.

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