I want a bright flashing display light. Imagine the sort of thing on a one armed bandit machine, that flashes a couple of times a second. And it would run for days on end. So either one of these which are rated at 5W:-
or:-
but the former is preferred as it contains all the necessary current control and is very easily replaceable without soldering.
Are these suitable? I'm concerned that as they run hot they'll be no different than an incandescent, suffering continuous thermal shock and mechanically breaking. Is there a more suitable high power LED for flashing or might I just as well use a traditional filament bulb?
There's Strobing very high power LEDs but that seems to deal more with frequency than resilience. There are some other questions too but again they seem to deal with implementation issues.
Best Answer
The first one is a LED bulb, the second is a bare light emitting diode (LED). LEDs can be driven in pulses and in most applications they are.
The LED bulb may contain a semiconductor current driver or may use a single resistor. If current is limited only with a resistor you can safely drive it with pulses with constant voltage amplitude. Otherwise you should check how the internal electronics will work in such mode. In most cases this mode will be bad for the bulb's electronics and may shorten it's life.
Pulsing the bare LED with constant current amplitude is best, but you have to be sure of the current waveform trough it and how much current overshoot occurs during turn on & turn off. This requires precise selection of the current driver and the switching off technique - breaking the circuit or shortening the LED. Not any "off the shelf" driver will work good enough.