Hello there! I am building a home haunted house and am stumped with an electrical issue. Let me preface that I'm pretty techie but I have little more than a basic understanding of circuits so I'm humbly asking for any suggestions on this. I have an Elation Cyber-Pak lighting controller that has four 120v channels, each of which can be turned on/off or dimmed by way of MIDI signals from a computer or sequencer. It works great for regular lights, but I need to have one of the channels turn a strobe light on and off at a certain time. It seems that this lighting controller (by design, I've been told) always has some low amount of voltage coming out of the channels even when in an "off" position, most likely to prevent thermal shock and blowing out the bulbs when turning lights on and off frequently. However, this voltage seems to be just enough to periodically charge the capacitor in the strobe light, causing it to flash once every 5 seconds or so. I'd like to integrate some sort of circuit that would prevent this voltage bleed for reaching the strobe light so that it only flashes when I send an on signal to the light controller channel. I was reading a bit about JFET's but I don't have the knowledge to determine if that's a good option. Just FYI I have tried isolating the strobe from the channel by way of a 120v relay - The voltage coming out of the MIDI controller is enough to trip the relay so that didn't work. Also put a multimeter on one of the channels while in the off position - It read about 60 volts but dropped to zero over a twenty second period. I'm not really sure what that means... Thank you for your time.

 

Just got a message back from the manufacturer suggesting I add another light or other device in parallel to "drain" the excess power. It works!

 

Hi,

Glad that "works". Sounds like the specs on the goodies isn't too tight.

 

Glad it works. With some tinkering, a relay and some trouble you could have made it so only a voltage above a certain trigger point turned on the relay which supplied power to the strobe.