Modify Cheap Strobes?

[James Lehman]

My dad used to be really into studio photography. He has a set of strobes that slave off of the flash on his camera. Each slave has a photo detector and when it sees a flash, it sets off it's own. They are fast enough that the human eye can not see the delay. So the idea of an electronically triggered strobe is nothing new. Now that digital photography has pretty much taken over, and CCDs are much more light sensitive, you can probably clean out a few old-timer's basements and get all kinds of strobes for cheap or nothing.

BTW Have you ever seen the film of Edgerton working on his mega strobe for aerial military photography? It's pretty cool. He holds up a newspaper, draped over a stick about 6 feet in front of it and it explodes into flames!

James.

[Onge]

He has a set of strobes that slave off of the flash on his camera. Each slave has a photo detector and when it sees a flash, it sets off it's own. They are fast enough that the human eye can not see the delay.
James.

Yeah I have a set of auto strobes for my underwater photography and it's that fast it looks like one flash.

André

[seanharrison]

i used to fire up the strobes from the quiet parts of dance tunes, once the beats kick back in when dj'ing. gets the crowds going. they where just DMX

[instinct]

i used to fire up the strobes from the quiet parts of dance tunes, once the beats kick back in when dj'ing. gets the crowds going. they where just DMX

i love to do that as well.. turn off all scanners and moving heads and turn on the strobes for the build-up.. then when the beat drops hit the lights.

[Renegade Lumen]

those things that trigger studio lights on a flash are called "optical slaves"... generally there are better ways to do the triggering like radio. The key thing is that a studio strobe is designed to fire once, but a "club strobe" for want of a better word, is designed to flash...

If I were to do this, for a lighting effect, I'd leave it flashing and use a BPM detector to set the frequency. There are a couple of ways you could do that with some simple software on your PC and control a digital resistor from a parallel port or something...

[carmangary]

I dated a girl that worked at a planetarium once. When the laser light show came to town her job was to push the strobe button one time during the show at the right time during one of the songs. Who needs computers? haha. I will be adding support for strobes and fog machines in my software eventually and will allow control via DMX or TTL.

[flecom]

I dated a girl that worked at a planetarium once. When the laser light show came to town her job was to push the strobe button one time during the show at the right time during the show. Who needs computers? haha. I will be adding support for strobes and fog machines in my software eventually and will allow control via DMX or TTL.

dont suppose she worked in the miami planetarium? lol

everything is still pretty much manual there, its great

[Insanity]

Pulsar used to do something called the Rainbow Strobe controller. It needed more than one strobe to work, but if you get 4 on it...... Wow!!!!!

It did sound activated chases and all manner of tricks... We used to use one with 4 strobeflower effects that can change colour as well.. You don't see em so much anymore unfortunately. I loved nothing more than filling the room with smoke, sticking the strobeflowers on a random chase and watch all the clubbers bumping into each other disorientated....

Mark

[Insanity]

Check out http://www.opti-kinetics.com/content/view/66/99/ for strobeflowers and various controllers....

And here for the Rainbow controller http://www.pulsarlight.com/Products/...5/Default.aspx

I know it's expensive kit, but it might get the old brain cogs turning to create simpler, cheaper alternatives with all the electronics guru's on PL...

Mark

Pulsar used to do something called the Rainbow Strobe controller. It needed more than one strobe to work, but if you get 4 on it...... Wow!!!!!

It did sound activated chases and all manner of tricks... We used to use one with 4 strobeflower effects that can change colour as well.. You don't see em so much anymore unfortunately. I loved nothing more than filling the room with smoke, sticking the strobeflowers on a random chase and watch all the clubbers bumping into each other disorientated....

Mark

[ChaosIllumination]

Pulsar used to do something called the Rainbow Strobe controller. It needed more than one strobe to work, but if you get 4 on it...... Wow!!!!!

It did sound activated chases and all manner of tricks... We used to use one with 4 strobeflower effects that can change colour as well.. You don't see em so much anymore unfortunately. I loved nothing more than filling the room with smoke, sticking the strobeflowers on a random chase and watch all the clubbers bumping into each other disorientated....

Mark

Yes, Opti Strobeflowers and the more common Club Strobeflowers are great pieces of kit, I love 'em. They were state of the art back in the early '90s.

Unfortunately it's not a simple case of plugging in a Pulsar Rainbow controller to the Opti kit without some modification though.

The Pulsar uses the common +10V pulses to trigger strobes over a 1/4" jack, but the Club Strobeflowers use a common +ve with pulses pulled down to ground to trigger, and also uses a stereo jack to allow flash and beam rotate functions.

The even older and rarer original Strobeflowers that had colour change and beam rotate speed control needed to be controlled from the matching Opti controller which used their own serial protocol. I know a little bit about them...

http://www.chaosillumination.co.uk/strobeflowers.htm

http://www.chaosillumination.co.uk/P...flower/PSF.htm

I'm a sort of unofficial Opti museum here...

Sadly both fixtures are now obsolete and unavailable, and even worse replacement lamps are recently no longer available. So if anyone out there has any unused ones they want to sell please shout up!

Neil