Plow Strobe Upgrade Using LED's and Arduino

I bought this strobe on CL a while ago. It was kinda of wimpy compared to modern ones.

Even with the strobe board removed and staring right at the tubes it was not very bright.

I have plenty of custom PCB's lying around I made for another project so upgrading it should be easy

I got some really cheap 10W Amber LED's on eBay to fix that. I started with the blink example in the Arduino IDE and kept tweaking it until it was impossible to ignore...

You can see from the videos the difference it made.

The first thing to do is to gut the strobe but watch out for those caps. they can hold a charge for a while and give you a really nasty shock. Save those parts for another project...

I used a Seig mini mill to hollow out the strobe cavity and make the square holes for the LED's. A Dremel would work just as well. A little touch up with a small Xacto knife for wire clearance and it ready.

I used a single series pass resistor for both LED's since I didn't plan to light them at the same time. you could use separate resistors for each LED or even Constant current sources. I wanted to keep it cheap

I like this way because I can easily add a "DIm / Bright" switch later that just parallels another resistor across this one.

I used a piece of copper flashing to solder the LED's to and a piece of aluminum angle iron acting as a heat sink to back that up. Two small screws in the center keep it all together. I epoxied the resistor to the angle iron. I'll add the second one later if I need it brighter.

You can use whatever you happen to have on hand. An Uno, Mini, even a bare 328P and some protoboard. I have a bunch of left over Pumpkin Controllers from another Ible. I used one of those.

They have 3 N mosfets but I only populate two for this strobe. I thought about using RGB LED's and being able to make a multi use strobe. Add a switch for different patterns and colors. Blue for Volunteer Firefighters, Red for Fire, Green for EMS, Red/Blue for Police etc but that's already covered in a different Ible. This ones only plain Amber...

Besides who wants to get arrested for pushing the wrong button in public........

I have shield versions as well as standalone boards. As luck would have it the standalone board was a perfect fit into the mounting rails for the original strobe board. That settles it. I used this one:

The only problem is you either need an FTDI cable to plug in to the headphone jack on the board to let you upload programs or you need a USBASP style programmer to program the chip directly.

Luckily I have a bunch of USBASP's on hand. Even this breadboarded one with ZIF sockets for programing most 8-28 pin dip atmel chips.

Might do an Ible on that board later.

I decided to make the power cord detachable. I used the original cord which oddly enough looks like a European AC line cord. Had to tone that cable out. Brown was ground and Blue was +12V.

I drilled out the original power cable hole to take the new jack. Once assembled it looks like it belongs there.

I didn't add a power switch but hey, it didn't come with one either..... I might add a SPDT center off switch and another resistor to make a "Bright / Off / Dim" switch.....