photography is all about light. It’s literally best there in the name – stemming from the Greek word, photos. This is why photographers obsess over the time of day of a shoot, why Instagrammers coalesce around landmarks at sunset, and why a flash helps you take photos in darkness. Historically, flashes have worked in all manner of ways – using burning magnesium or xenon lamps for example. For this Hackaday prize entry, [Yann Guidon] is developing a portable flash using LEDs instead.
By this point in time, you might be familiar with LEDs as flash units from your cellphone. However, [Yann] is taking this up a notch. The build is based around 100W LED modules, which certainly can pump out a lot of light. The interesting part of the build is its dual nature. The LEDs are intended to operate in one of two ways. The first is in a continuous lighting mode, running the modules well below their rated power to decrease the tension on the LEDs and power supply, and to enable the flash to run on the purchase of an hour. In this mode, temperature feedback will be used to control the LEDs to manage power use. The other is a pulsed mode, where the LED will be overvolted for a period of milliseconds to create a much much more powerful flash.
It’s this dual nature which gives the LED-based flash a potential advantage over less versatile xenon-based units, which are limited to pulsed operation only. We can see the continuous lighting mode being particularly helpful for videographers needing a compact, low-cost lighting service that can also work as a pulsed unit as well.We’re thrilled to see how [Yann] tackles the packaging, thermal and control issues as this project develops!
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