OK KITAs, you are my go to place to ask these kinds of questions! Here is my idea!

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

OK KITAs, you are my go to place to ask these kinds of questions! Here is my idea!

 

I want to make a small (hand-held) strobe light. I will controll it with a Arduino, and power it with batteries. But I was wondering if there is a solution not using LEDs? Like Xeon bulbs? I'm not sure I can get the 'flash' I want from an LED and batteries. And not sure how to power a flash bulb like that!

 

Any ideas? Am I under valuing the LED route?

[G+_Robert Hafer]

I guess it matters if you are using your strobe light for a dance party or to capture high speed repetitive motion.

For the latter, the strobe has to be significantly brighter than the ambient light, so your eyes only "see" the image during the flash. If you can use it in a dark room, you don't need a lot of light; a strobe outdoors during the day has to be really bright.

I don't have any experience with the dance party use case.

 

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

I do not need to use it during the day. This would be used in dark rooms.

[G+_Robert Hafer]

LEDs should work fine. For a lab quality stroboscope, you need fine control of the time between flashes.

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

I have looked at 10W leds, but say I want 6 of them to strobe at once, I am concerned about powering them. Fine timing control is not necessary.

[G+_todd zimmerman]

Why do you want to include the use of an Arduino? Seems to be a bit of an over-kill. Most stobes I've seen (from the 80's) used a simple timing circuit to charge a capacitor to discharge/fire a xeon bulb, where the cycle rate is controlled by a varistor.

 

If you do a Xeon, use caution as you'll be dealing with high voltages (on the discharges)

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

todd zimmerman Arduino isnt totally needed. But may want to use different ways of controlling it in the future. Thanks for the info though!

[G+_todd zimmerman]

I did a quick search for "strobe light circuit" and saw this link & circuit.. electroschematics.com - Strobe Light Circuit/

[G+_todd zimmerman]

As you can see, the circuit isn't too complex

>

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

Thanks todd zimmerman. 220v!! Yikes!

[G+_todd zimmerman]

Yeah. I don't know why that particular circuit is running so high -- that was the first one I looked at. Search around and you should find something closer to what you want.

 

In regards to the 10w LEDs, I'm not sure if that high (relatively higher that typical 5v?) voltage or amps. I'm curious on how such a circuit would be designed. (I'd use a low volt timer to trigger a high voltage/ current side to engergize the LEDs strung in parallel. I'm just not sure how the isolation bridge would work... )

[G+_Golden Retriever]

35mm camera strobe has tons of blinding power and pins that allow the camera trigger the flash.

 

I used to carry one, while not technically a weapon if someone is attempting to assault you it will stun them long enough to get the upper hand.

[G+_Ben Reese]

This could be done with a simple relay board. Mechanical relays are noisy when strobing, but there are solid state relays that should work fine. You'll probably also want capacitors before the relays to help the power source, but that depends on how much power your supply can give in bursts. A single 10W 12V LED will need 833mA so if you're wanting 6 of them, you need a power supply capable of providing >5A for the duration of your duty cycle.

 

Do you know what kind of batteries you'll be using?

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

Ben Reese That's kind of the route I was thinking about taking. Not sure of the battery yet. I know that some of the quad batteries are capable of very high amps. But thats part of the problem I havent figured out yet. Do you have a recommendation?

[G+_Ben Reese]

I don't have any recommendations, but I haven't gotten into the quadcopter builds yet. I believe the Lithium Ion batteries were 7.2V. The 10W LEDs I see on Amazon need 9-12V, so you'll need 2 battery packs in series. Of course, then you'll have >14V, but I suspect it's easier to go down in voltage than up.

 

And again, that's just me thinking without any experience. A few years ago I setup a strobe with 110v Christmas Lights using mechanical relays, but that was pretty simple and not portable. My main takeaway from that was even though it was possible to turn the relay on/off 100 times in a second, anything over ~30 hz wasn't noticeable.

[G+_Kyle Boyington]

Ben Reese Ahh interesting about the relays! Thanks for the heads up!

[G+_Trevor L.]

pics when you get it working!

sounds cool.