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I've been working on a LED strobe project for a couple years now, on and off, mostly off. Mine allows precise control of frequency/period and on-time. It has an LCD display and drives a 5W luxeon LED.
Special drivers are not needed for Luxeon LEDs any more than they are needed for any other LED. My strobe fires 15A current spikes through the LED to get adequate brightness for microscope illumination with pulse durations as short as 5 us. The uC drives a low threshold MOSFET that switches the large current through the LED.
The controller uses a PIC uC plugged into a slightly modified off-the-shelf board with LCD display. I use timer1 in the uC with the capture/compare module to generate interrupts to fire the flash at accurately timed intervals.
The strobe tuners I have seen have a spinning disc with black and white pattern corresponding to specific notes. The firing of the lamp is driven by the audio signal from the instrument. Is this how you're planning to make the tuner? In that case you don't need a precision strobe, you need a precision motor speed control and patterned disc, and some sort of circuit to process the incoming audio from a mic to fire a lamp.
PICs are microcontrollers. They are fully reprogrammable, so you're not destroying any bits or creating any new circuits when you program them. Put simply, they get inputs from a variety of sources and process them to generate outputs as required. Inputs can come from external sources such as buttons or encoders, etc., or internal sources such as counters, timers, the master clock, etc. The processing can be as simple or as complex as you can imagine. You write a program that tells the uC which inputs you want to watch, and when, and what outputs you want to generate under what circumstances.
Yes, if you have either a PIC programmer or an appropriately set-up target board, you can DL programs from the web and burn them into the PIC like an mp3 file. However, programs for uCs are very dependent on the hardware (the circuit that the uC is part of), so unless you duplicate the hardware, the program from the web may not work in your circuit. You can disassemble such programs and see what techniques were used to achieve desired results but that is sort of an advanced technique. Most people who post code on the web post an explanation of how it works, so you don't have to disassemble the program to see what it does.
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LED Strobes?
