Using a crystal to flash a light at a high frequency?

[Resistanceisfutile]

So I've been looking to make a light flash at a very high speed (microseconds).
I have a 1MHZ crystal oscillator, this should give me a period of one microsecond.
If I was to power the crystal, and attach the output to the base of a transistor, could I use this to make a light attached to the emitter flash (if I applied the appropriate voltage and current to collector) by letting voltage and current through every microsecond?
If not, can anyone think of another way to do this?

 

[esp1]

hi,
If the light is a filament type, you will find that the thermal inertia of the filament wire will not respond to a 1MHz pulse drive, it will most likely appear at 'half illumination'.
E

 

[jiripolivka]

So I've been looking to make a light flash at a very high speed (microseconds).
I have a 1MHZ crystal oscillator, this should give me a period of one microsecond.
If I was to power the crystal, and attach the output to the base of a transistor, could I use this to make a light attached to the emitter flash (if I applied the appropriate voltage and current to collector) by letting voltage and current through every microsecond?
If not, can anyone think of another way to do this?

What is the purpose of doing this?

You need a device like a LED which would convert your us pulses to light, and a photodiode to detect it.
Both devices must respond fast enough but this is a problem.
Recently, researchers try to transmit data by light, and they need special LED designs as well as photodiodes fast enough.

 

[Externet]

If not, can anyone think of another way to do this?

What you want can be a fiber optic transmitter without the fiber.

-----> https://www.jameco.com/1/1/15324-hfbr-1414z-fiber-optic-transmitter-792-865nm-20mbps.html

They usually work infrared. If you want visible light, a LED capable of the frequencyv could take the place of the IR emitter but will suffer from daylight interference at the detection end.

 

[D.A.(Tony)Stewart]

So I've been looking to make a light flash at a very high speed (microseconds).
I have a 1MHZ crystal oscillator, this should give me a period of one microsecond.
If I was to power the crystal, and attach the output to the base of a transistor, could I use this to make a light attached to the emitter flash (if I applied the appropriate voltage and current to collector) by letting voltage and current through every microsecond?
If not, can anyone think of another way to do this?

One cannot design a driver without specs on load.

Driving a 20mA is far different than a 5A laser pulse at low duty cycle.

Junction capacitance affects turn off time which increases with current capacity. Saturated ESR is about 1 Ohm per Watt, so driver must be lower impedance with higher linear R current limiter in series.
Typical 5mm LED is 50pF at 0V but ESR ~ 0.1V/1uA = 100 kΩ (ballpark) not fast.... or 5us turn off time.

My rule of thumb ESR~1 [Ω-W] means 1W = 1Ω, 100mW = 10 Ω, 10W=100 mΩ


Consider any push-pull driver has an ESR with buffered CMOS, Bipolar or MOSFETs according to drive current using a current limiting R or CC limiter. CMOS ESR from internal RdsOn ranges from 25 using ALCV2 to >300 Ohms for old CDxxxx logic.

Compute ESR of any driver from specs for delta V/I. Eg Vcc-Vol(min) @ Ioh or Vol/Iol (min,typ,max)

consult IRDA2 data sheets

 

[FvM]

A driver with µs period and e.g. 100 or 200 ns pulse width isn't a big thing. But only a few light sources can be driven in this time scale, primarly LEDs (many but not all are suitable) and laser diodes come into view, possibly special gas discharge devices.