Bypassing on-board pot in favour of remote pot.

[Portland Bill]

Hi all, I've got two 20w mini strobes that I need to mount to the ceiling, but the frequency pot is mounted on the lights themselves, and needs to be adjusted at desk level, and in sync with each other.

Is there a way I can bypass the installed potentiometers, and use something on the cable at desk level to control the frequency of them both?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Unfortunately it's a very low spec unit (kids bedroom sort of thing), so has few facilities. More capable units include external triggering, so you could trigger them both together.

So what you need to do is add external triggering, and build an external control unit to trigger them - a simple 555, or other oscillator, is all you'd need.

So you really need a schematic of what's inside them, drawing it out yourself assuming you can't source one?.

Once you've got external triggering, you can do cool things like sequencing them - producing lightning like effects across a stage etc.

 

[gophert]

Wire it up like the old-school Hollywood props. Simply add an RC airplane style servo motor to the knob and operate the servo with an RC radio (the Star Trek EXOCOMP prop used exactly this method to control the flash rate of all the little lights) .

Old Futaba radios are available for cheap on the used market.