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.

 

Originally posted by kell@Jan 20 2005, 11:42 PM
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.

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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".