I'm currently designing and building an LED based strobe light for the amusement of my 10-year old. A chip off the old block
I've built a number of Xenon flash tube based strobes (back in the 70's and 80's) and wanted something a bit safer (400V inside and line powered = nasty). I will never forget getting whacked by the 6kV trigger pulse during testing. And the UV output of a xenon tube is another reason to go with LEDs.
My plan so far is to use a 5500K LED (a little bluish is somewhat xenon-like). I have a few Lite-on LOPL-E031W emitters on hand (3W, 75 lumens @ 700mA). I'm driving it with a PIC-based pulse generator of my own design. The PIC reads a pot to change the pulse rate, and drives a logic-level FET to switch the LED. The whole thing is powered from 5V (yep, lots safer than Xenon!).
Since the duty cycle is VERY short (about 100uS ~ 500uS on time), I'm going to drive the LED at 2-3 amps peak current. Expect to get >150 lumens out of it.
If it works out as well as expected, I'm going to design a more useful, calibrated version with a digital encoder and LCD display - a stroboscope - for RPM measurements, guitar tuning, whatever.
Anyone else ever made such a thing and/or have any interest in a DIY project?
LED strobe light project
Linear Mode
