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Re: Terry's Strobe



At 10:32 PM 03/26/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>TCML,
>
>I put together Terry's strobe last night and had a
>chance to try it out. Anyone with a sync gap and
>twenty bucks should put one of these together:
>it's a fabulous idea...
>
>However, the pulse is kinda wide for 3600 rpm
>motors. The moving electrodes appear as a blur
>instead of appear as if they are frozen in time
>(OK, I could split the difference of the blur, but...).
>It'd be nice to couple this circuit with a xenon flash
>to really round out the idea. 120 Hz operation would
>be nice too. Anyone out there willing to give it a
>try with me?...
>
>Jeff W. Parisse
>Director, kVA Effects
>www.teslacoil-dot-com
>

Hi Jeff,

	I was not thinking about 3600 RPM when I designed that :-)  The pulse are
indeed probably a little wide but you can probably squeak by in a dark room.

	One could redesign it to use perhaps a laser LED or the new white LEDs if
their persistence is low enough.  The pulse width can be varied over a high
range but one needs to be carful not to destroy the LED with short high
current pulses.

	Perhaps what you are really looking for would be something along the
following lines.  You could get a DC timing light from say Sears and
connect it into a "box" that would provide 12 VDC to run the light and then
have a trigger pulse to activate it.  120 BPS works out to 1800 RPM on a
V-8 engine which is well within the strobe lights capability.  The 12VDC
supply is easy so one would only need to figure out how to fire the timing
light with a circuit anyone could make easily.

	Such a timing light would work in low to mid light so it could be used in
many "real" situations where total darkness is not available.  Certainly
not a "low budget" thing considering most cars today don't need timing
adjusted anymore so the light would really not have any other use for most.
 Perhaps the timing circuit could be as simple as a small extra NST with a
little gap to make a small spark (a spark plug comes to mind ;-))  Then one
could just clip the light to the wire but it would have to be really well
insulated to prevent a short charging the light and the user up to high
voltage.  I have a little bug zapper transformer that is low voltage and
low current (relatively) that may be good for this and I have a timing
light so I'll look into this.  I am not sure the pulse would be really well
timed in this set up however.  Many possibilities here...

BTW - Jeff, did you ever get E-Tesla5 to figure out you tuning problem?  If
not catch me off list and I can help out.  I got too busy last week to
think much about it.


BBTW - My strobe instruction are at:

http://www.peakpeak-dot-com/~terryf/tesla/misc/STROBE.ZIP

The pictures are when I had the parts spread out all over the floor ;-))
You really are supposed to build it into a nice little box.  I "thought" I
had the completed strobe picture in that file but...

Cheers,

	Terry