Adjustable strobe

Hi all,

I am in need of 4 small adjustable strobe lights for work.(E-Tac T20C2 size)
They will eventualy be hardwired and set at a particular frequency to match our machinery. (at least up to 20hertz)
I thought I would be able to mod a few cheap flashlights from DX to obtain the desired result.
I would need at least a 200Lumen OTF flashlight, single mode clicky without digital regulation.....I can deal with a resistor.
Certainly not the qualities I look for in a flashlight for personal use but this is what I believe I would need to start the process.
Any thoughts?


Thanks


Simon

I'll move this to H&M for you - you should get a better response there.

Maglite xl100 has an adjustable strobe, but it's not as bright as you need and it adjusts via some sort of gravity selector ( hold the button down and twist your wrist) the xl200 is supposed to come out this year, that'll have 200 lumens, the xl100 has a 110 lumens I think.

DM51 said:

I'll move this to H&M for you - you should get a better response there.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the help.


Simon

that sounds like a lot of work to take existing flashlights and "modify" them to that extreme.

your first issue is that strobe is controlled by a microchip. there won't be a way to alter the frequency without the effort of writing your own code and burning it to a chip. it would probably be impossible (in a practical way) to remove the chip from the driver of almost any flashlight.

i think you'd be better served by starting from the ground up. if i were working on this project, i'd start with 4 leds on stars, a power supply, and some electronics (microchip + pic programmer, some rotary encoders, etc). may be an arduino uno would be a good place to start. it has 4 pulse width modulation channels and is easy to get working code. you could probably fab a prototype in a couple hours and $100 (maybe less).

If this is going to be something fixed (hardwired, mentioned) Then +1 on building it yourself, most the strobes on flashlights run at ~50% duty cycle, and ones with switchmode converters can have a relatively slow risetime, one I have handy, takes over 20ms to rise, running at 12.3Hz for the strobe, at close to a 50% duty cycle.

Take whatever light you'd like for LED/Lens/Reflector, and drive it with an AMC7135 type of driver, then build a 555 Astable, and feed the output of the 555 into the VDD pins on the AMC chips, similar to how its done on multi-mode AMC driver boards. I'd imagine you want your pulsewidth of the flash in the .1-1ms range to freeze-frame stuff nicely, though it would depend on how fast its actually moving.

Thanks for your replies chaps.......this project was to help save a few dollars for my workplace. We have a strobe ready to be mounted already....but at $1000 each, i thought this a little too expensive.
But the powers that be have decided time is of the essence so they are going to fork out another 3G to have what we need sooner.

Thanks again.