Nowadays, single-color and multi-color flashing LEDs are easily available, which obviates the requirement of external chips to produce fascinating lighting effects ...

The project is a simple way of producing a fading LED without the need to program the chips or write the code but rather using a few simple components with a constant fade up and fade down as the end ...

It is a pretty common first project to use an Arduino (or similar) to blink an LED. Which, of course, brings taunts of: you could have used a 555! You can, of course, also use any sort of oscillator, ...