I'm looking for some help on driving some IR emitters at high frequencies with a duty cycle of ~5-10%. This is for a lab experiment where i'm looking at the response of photosynthetic bacteria to pulsed IR light. The IR emitters that i've been browsing on digi key draw about ~50 mA of current at 1.5 V. I don't plant on running the emitters in parallel, so they shouldn't draw more current than the above mentioned value. Initially I would like to drive the emitters with 1 MHz square waves at a 5% duty cycle, but would later like to do 2 MHz with a 10% duty cycle.
I had in my head a system where some square wave generator would control a transistor, which would switch the IR emitters on and off. The problem is I don't really know which wave generators or transistors would i) work reliably at those frequencies, and ii) work well with each other. Also, are there drawbacks to using the same power source to control both the square wave generator and the IR emitter? Finally, can I build such a circuit without the use of a microcontroller (since I don't really know how to program them yet)?
I had in my head a system where some square wave generator would control a transistor, which would switch the IR emitters on and off. The problem is I don't really know which wave generators or transistors would i) work reliably at those frequencies, and ii) work well with each other. Also, are there drawbacks to using the same power source to control both the square wave generator and the IR emitter? Finally, can I build such a circuit without the use of a microcontroller (since I don't really know how to program them yet)?