strobe circuit

I want to build a circuit that flashes a strobe ten times a second. From what I understand the typical camera strobe has a little converter that charges a cap to a few hundred volts and the cap gets dumped into the strobe light for the flash.

I'm sure this is the kind of thing that has been done a million times. Maybe I could get a a surplus camera strobe circuit from one of the surplus suppliers like allelectronics or goldmine. If it can charge in 1/10 sec I can just hook it up to a 555. I'm not so sure just any randomly acquired camera strobe would charge up that fast, though.
I was also thinking I could use an inductor to provide the energy for the strobe. Use a timing circuit to ramp up the inductor and then when the inductor gets cut off, the spike diverts through a diode into the strobe. Maybe this is not standard practice, but I have some experience building inductive switching circuits using timers and mosfets or igbts.

 

The converter your talking about is infact an inductor style of circuit in those cameras. Ripped one apart a while ago for a school project and it operates off of a switching inductor to generate the high voltage.

 

Yes I know. Just a little SMPS that charges a cap. I meant eliminate the cap -- fire the strobe directly off an inductor.

 

To elliminate the capacitor you'll prolly have to use a "beefier" supply. Most HV flash circuits use a relaxation type oscillator ( such as blocking) to deliver DC pulses into a small step-up transformer that dumps charge into a holding capacitor. A HV diode prevents the cap from discharging back thru the transformer windings and when the charge on the cap reaches the ignition voltage required to ignite the gas in the strobe, a comparator driven LED will indicate that its ready. Then just say "cheese".