Simple Circuit Design, Help me Ben, You're my Only Help.. or anyone else here

these sound like Ne2 bulbs, they normally have a trigger voltage of about 90v and are quite high impedence up until they strike up, and are normally fed with a high value resistor (100k +).

one idea would be to use a Low value resistor in line with this Ne2 bulb (say 1 or 2k) and use the P.D across it when the bulb lights, to trigger a transistors base, which will in turn activate your buzzer/beeper unit.

there will be Other ideas though, so hang tight

there is a resistor tied into the bulb, so im guessing it's what you say it is. here's a close up shot

The bands are brown black yellow.  I was thinking of tapping directly to the 2 metal bases on the black plug and running that to a transistor but I was thinking, I want it to only beep once, so I was having trouble coming up with a way to charge a capacitor when the transistor is pulled low, then when its high, dump the capacitor out to my speaker (with bits in between to not blow the speaker/buzzer) but I'm an extreme novice and don't have a bunch of parts nor electronics to really scavange from at the moment. But I thank you for your reply, I'm sure someone's got just the diagram I need, I just need them to post it here, or have Ben take a stab at it.

BTW.. Great eye on the bulb. googled it and thats exactly what the bulb appears to be.

That is a 100K resistor that I mentioned, what you would need to do is find the Negative side of the bulb on the board, and put an additional 1-2K resistor in series with what you already have, and then Across that resistor the most Negative side would go to the Emitter if an NPN transistor, and the Base of that transistor to the other side of that resistor.

this will give you a full negaive voltage terminal to use against any low voltage positive, with which you can do your beeper thing.

you don`t want to put anything Across this bulb or its feed, unless it`s really high impedence, a small resistance can stop the bulb lighting entirely!

a non-invasive series connection would be your best bet in my opinion.

as for a single beep, well that would be another issue entirely, unless you wanted to use the Ne2 in a Relaxation Oscillator mode? or some sort of One-shot monostable?

as for my Eyes, I didn`t look at any pictures, I just took an educated guess as that was what it was when you described it. (I`v not worn my glasses once today!)

I'm not sure what i wanted to use.  No idea what relaxation oscillator mode was until I googled it. Along with one-shot monostable.  Google is my friend but after hours of searching for a solution I've yet to come up with a simple cheap method of implementing a single beep each time the light kicks on. I can do this using a Basic Stamp or Arduino, but there has to be a simple way of doing accomplishing this with a very small budget of say, $10-20 per strobe I own. n

In a simple basic stamp or arduino, this is basically the pseudo code i'd use.

BeepWhenReady: 

DO

  IF inputVoltage > 1V THEN                                          'light is on

    beepOnce                                                                 'play audible tone

    DO                                                                           'wait for discharge

      IF inputVoltage < 1V THEN GOTO BeepWhenReady  'flash was fired

    LOOP

LOOP

Basically just need simple electronic components to perform this logic and the schematic on how to implement it. I'd even donate a few bucks to somebodies paypal for a working schematic/part list that proves to work, I'm just stuck and i've been wanting to accomplish this for some time now. even went as far as checking out a few books at the library to try to figure it out.