120Hz LED Turntable Strobe in Altoids Tin

[hencethus]

I did this project about a year ago, but I thought I'd share it here.

The strobe on my turntable stopped working, so I made a battery-powered LED one to replace it. There's a pretty good write-up on how they work by a guy on eBay that sells them for like 80 bucks here: http://goo.gl/voLMe4. This one only cost a few bucks including the Altoids and the 9V battery.

I found a schematic here: http://www.vinylengine.com/diy-strobe.shtml
Then ordered the parts, got it working on a breadboard, and designed a stripboard layout with VeeCAD.


I didn't get many action shots, but here are some shots of the assembly process.



And finally, trying it out on my turntable. It works!

[Kilren]

Pretty cool! Have a video showing it working? How much control over the LED's do you have? Can you change colors on command, have it set to moods, etc.?

[hencethus]

@Kilren
It's it tool for adjusting the speed of the turntable, so there isn't any control over colors or anything like that. There's just a momentary contact on/off switch. When I hold it down the LEDs strobe at 120 Hz. There are 216 dots around the perimeter of the turntable platter that seem to freeze in place as they're lit by the strobe if the platter is spinning at 33 1/3 rpm. If it's too slow or too fast the dots seem to drift off slowly to the left or the right.

[joe7dust]

@Kilren
It's it tool for adjusting the speed of the turntable, so there isn't any control over colors or anything like that. There's just a momentary contact on/off switch. When I hold it down the LEDs strobe at 120 Hz. There are 216 dots around the perimeter of the turntable platter that seem to freeze in place as they're lit by the strobe if the platter is spinning at 33 1/3 rpm. If it's too slow or too fast the dots seem to drift off slowly to the left or the right.

This definitely needs a video.