[sdiy] LED maximum peak current

[Tavys Ashcroft]

>Now I want to do something similar, but I don't wat to do
>the current servoing in a discrete design for obvious reasons.
>I want to use the internal parasitic resistance of the
>LED.
>Do red (very bright) LEDs have the same current tolerance,
>i.e. 1A for a single pulse?
>What pulse rate and duty cycle is needed to make the apearent
>brightness as large as possible?

Well, I'm definitely no expert, but I have a friend who did something 
pretty interesting.  He's into model rocketry and wanted a 
superbright flasher to put inside a clear nosecone so he could watch 
the rocket fly up at night and then find it later when it came down. 
Working off a design from a disposable camera flash circuit he made 
this amazingly tiny thing that would fire very brief pulses into an 
LED.  All in all I think he had two surface mount style chips, a 
couple resistors, a capacitor and the LED all epoxied into this 
little tiny ball the size of a fingertip.  I'm not really sure what 
he used for it, but the LEDs would light up a room (for the brief 
instant they were on) and the pulse was so short that they didn't 
burn up.  Amazing.

-Tavys