Help me make a really cool Halloween costume!

[Blocko]

Hey guys,

I plan to go as Mega Man for Halloween. but I need a bit of help making his mega buster arm gun. I have a bit of electronics experience but nothing on this level before.

Basically what I would like to do is stick about 40 or so LED's inside the bottom of a 1L pop bottle the inside 10 would be solid on/off with a button press. But the remaining 30 I wanted to do a sort of 'Chasing light' effect to make it look like it was charging up for a more powerful shot. This would be on a separate button. I've attached a picture of what I'm thinking:



The inside 10 I know how to do just fine. It's the outside 30 that I'm have trouble trying to figure out. I know I'm going to have to use an IC of some kind to control the timing but I have no idea which IC will do it or what else would be required in terms of controlling the flash rate, power consumption, etc.

Can you guys help me out with this? Make mock up a quick schematic? If there is a way to do it without having to program a PIC or something that'd be ideal.

Thanks.

[Hero999]

The CD4017 can be cascaded to give more outputs. Unfortunately an output is lost, for every stage that's added, two counters only give 19 outputs so you'll need four ICs for 30 outputs.

Here's an example:
http://saint.419.removed.us/runlit.html

Here's another but goodness knows why the designer has decided to use a 555 rather than a couple of CD4069s for the clock oscillator. My guess is they don't know how to make an astable with a couple of logic gates.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25412417/Cascaded-CD4017

Attached shows how to sequence 30 LEDs using multiplexing enabling you to use only two ICs, plus a transistor for every 10 LEDs. It's possible to sequence up to 100 LEDs with this method.

Charlieplexing can be used with a microcontroller to enable a 14 pin PIC16F505 to control up to 90 LEDs. I know you don't want to use a PIC but I just thought I'd through that in there, in case you change your mind, considering how cheap a programmer is these days and that BASIC can be used for code, if you've not done C or assembler before.