Yet another fantastic Chinese industrial component. These beacons are often attached to factory machines to get attention when something goes wrong. Traditionally they would have either had xenon strobes or tungsten lamps in them, but the use of LEDs provides good sharp pulses of colourful light with low power draw.
This unit contains 15 LEDs, and it’s clear from the design of the PCB that one module is designed to be used with all colours of LEDs, and also work at 12, 24 and 48V by the simple use of an internal resistor for the higher voltages.
The circuitry is super simple. It’s just a traditional two transistor flip-flop circuit with the LEDs driven on one side and the two timing resistors chosen to provide brief flashes. It appears they may be going for a one in ten duty cycle and driving the LEDs quite hard at over 100mA for maximum intensity while remaining within their normal dissipation range.
There is an attempt to make the module waterproof via a large o-ring seal on the screw-on cover and fairly rigid sealing compound where the wires enter the unit. It comes with a wall/panel mounting twist-on base, but can also be mounted directly to a panel with two supplied machine screws going into threaded metal inserts in the strobe.
These units are available in red, amber, blue and white as standard, and cost a staggeringly low amount for what seems to be a very robust industrial component.
The ebay listing I bought this from was:-
But there are a LOT of listings for these units.
