I built this a long time ago as a possible fairground xenon strobe effect unit. Sadly it had an issue with cross triggering of the strobes. I should revisit some of these designs from the past and see if I can find out what caused the issues with them.
I'm thankfull this one never got into the market. I've rseen too many of your medusa boards as it is 😀
Many years ago I worked for Knott's Berry Farm as an entertainment tech…..this reminded me of one of the two best gags we pulled on our boss. We had taken the lamps out of the light fixtures in his office and fitted each fixture with a dozen strobes. When he came in and hit the switch that morning it looked like a nuclear blast going off. 🙂
The other gag was taking ALL of the office furniture and suspending it upside down, hanging from the ceiling. (WE had a structural grid above the tile ceiling grid.) It took all of the day and swing shift crew to do it overnight. The look on his face when he walked in was worth it. Having an experienced rigger on the crew always made for fun times.
You just need to add a diode in series with each stage and a separate psu for the ic chip
Massive Decoupling, Light & EM Shielding "can"s around each strobe circuit & I'd then try coax from trigger IC to each strobe can if that is needed? Should be interesting 🙂
just don't take any chip in or on you. RFID READ REV 13 atb👍
Hi there,it's the light that triggers the other bulbs….they cannot "see" each other or be close together. space them apart and a black cardboard should do the trick.
Hi there,it's the light that triggers the other bulbs….they cannot "see" each other or be close together. space them apart and a black cardboard should do the trick.
Had a similar issue with an attempt to control firing 6 pairs of xenon tubes in sequence to excite a ruby rod for a one-of custom built pulse laser project. After a couple of failed prototypes I ended up buying a commercially available controller which worked fine with a bit of interfacing circuitry. After appropriate testing the finished laser unit was put into service for the customer & all was good 🙂 I had hoped to investigate the commercial circuit to suss out where I had gone wrong with my own designs but sadly all the interesting bits were buried in potting compound & I did not have time to investigate further so I never did not get to the bottom of it and the trouble with the strobes all firing at once was left as a mystery. Would be most interested in your findings as it has been lurking in my memory for years & would be nice to have some idea of what was really going on even if I never need to really know but as I am sure You know it is always nice to satisfy 'the nosiness' 🙂
Had done something similar , but with shift registers( 74164)- programmable strobing lights. It was fun, but lot of capacitors,and xenon lamps died* – the thermal load was bigger than I expected. I had also isolation issues but in later model I used opto SCRs (moc3020?) and it worked well.
* Only available xenon lamp here in Czech.Rep. was russian xenon lamp IFK120
I think you should revisit it sometime, it seems like an interesting look at transience if you're correct on why it doesn't exactly work.
One vote here for the "revisit and make it work please Clive" campaign!!! 🙂
As many people have previously commented it seems that isolation is the key here. While having the trigger circuitry remote to each strobe is a good idea, if you wanted it all in the same case maybe separate and screen each channel with metal cans like in RF circuits. Possibly even feeding each from a separate mains transformer or winding and opto-isolating to the control circuitry.