On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:33:32 -0000, wrote:

On Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 11:36:48 AM UTC-5, William Gothberg wrote:
On Wed, 19 Dec 2018 16:18:29 -0000, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 12/19/18 5:23 AM, William Gothberg wrote:
Do switch mode power supplies flicker in time with mains? Specifically
LED power supplies in commercially available domestic lamps. By in
time, I don't mean at the same 50/60Hz, but anchored to it. I.e. if you
have several such lamps each with their own built in supply, will they
all flicker in time, using the mains frequency to keep them in time, or
will they be random, making the room overall not flicker due to them all
being random? And is there any way I can test this? I tried taking
photos of them, but my camera only goes as fast as 1/2000th of a second,
which shows all the lights at the same brightness each time, I suspect
the flicker is above 2000Hz.

I once had an audio amplifier with a solar cell rather than a microphone
for the input transducer. This made it possible to listen to light. The
sun is steady, incandescent lights (AC powered) hum.

That was 40 years ago. Maybe something like that would work today.

The trouble is I want to compare 2kHz+ from one light with 2kHz+ from a neighbouring light and see if they're in sync.

it is very unlikely that they will be in sync.
mark

Agreed. All I can detect (with my digital camera) is that one brand of LED light I have flickers about 5 times less (not sure if it's smother or faster) than the others. It's also the brand that lasts longer, probably better designed overall.