Xenon Lighting From Retro Flash Tube
Introduction: Xenon Lighting From Retro Flash Tube
Heres how to repurpose a retro flash tube into a lamp.
Note there will be high voltage involved. Be sure to know how to work on it safely and do not work on it when its plugged in
Supplies
You'll need a small flash tube of some type(I used an ifk120) a halo eyes inverter and a 12v power supply(i used a 5v usb power supply however i found inconsistent results in that some tubes wouldn't start up because the voltage was too low for them), optionally some leather for decoration
Step 1: Disassemble Case and Drill Holes
The back of the halo eye inverter can be popped off. Then the circuit board is removed by cutting the potting compound from the case.
Holes in the back case cover are marked with the tube's spacing and then drilled out. The holes are then enlarged to fit the xenon tube.
Step 2: Gluing the Leather(optional)
This step is pretty self explanatory. 98
A peice of leather was glued to the top of the case and then cut to shape for decoration. I got the leather from an old thrift shop jacket
Step 3: Modifying the Electronics(output Side)
The potting compound was removed from the output capacitors(blue things) from both the top and bottom sides of the pcb.
The wires for one output channel was removed. Its layed out in such a way that there are 2 wires commoned together and there are 2 other wires connecting to each capacitor
What needs to be done is one of the common wires gets cut off and one of the wires connecting to a cap gets cut off.
Then the capacitor that is connected to the remaining output gets shorted out. This usually is for current limiting but it isnt nessisary to have
Step 4: Modifying the Electronics(input Side)
The potting compound was removed from the bottom of the input side.
The existing wires were removed
The power supplies wire was stripped, tinned, and soldered in so it replaced the existing wires
Step 5: Reassembly
The xenon tube was pushed into the bottom cover where holes where drilled and glued in.
The output wires are silicone and so they can just be pushed onto the xenon tube terminals
The top cover was then closed and the project is completed 98