Blinking an LED s l o w l y

I get an email from Nuts and Volts magazine weekly with some links to free articles (see the newsletter signup link at the bottom of the page):

https://www.nutsvolts.com/

This article caught my eye recently:

https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/some-simple-transistor-and-ic-circuits

Here is the web site of the author, KE3FL:  

https://www.cs.yrex.com/ke3fl/

The circuit that interested me was ramping the brightness of an LED up and down slowly to blink it.

  I finally read the article, the circuit is a phase shift oscillator but at less than 1 Hz so the caps are big (electrolytics).  The author's video looks good although it's in subdued light.  I had a little trouble getting the circuit to play (didn't have a white LED at hand) so I tried simulating it with LTSpice:

the green trace is out, the blue trace is sine

this is the collector voltage

Since it does seem to simulate I tried fiddling with it - got it to sustain oscillation by increasing the series resistance to the LED, R5 from 10 k ohms to 15 k ohms (added a 4.7k ohm resistor in series).  Otherwise the oscillation would damp out after less than 10 on/off cycles.

The circuit isn't for me, the LED is too dim, the circuit is too complicated.  The circuit uses from 1 to 2 ma at 9 volts.  Unless you are gaga for the slow blink effect the winner is still the blinking LED, mentioned here:

https://wb9kzy.blogspot.com/2023/07/blinking-led.html

But it was worth trying, an interesting way to do it - I think some engineers working on cars fall in love with the idea of gradually turning down the cabin lights when the door is closed :)   I just want an LED to blink with as little fuss as possible.

Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm