My son's Elenco Snap Circuits Jr. SC-100 toy came with a spinning disc that demonstrates stroboscopic behavior when accelerating or decelerating under a fluorescent light. I built my own LED strobe with adjustable frequency and duty cycle to make the effect a bit more visible. In the following video you can see what happens as the duty cycle is adjusted:
The circuit is too simple to show a schematic for - just a LED with current limiting resistor and three potentiometers connected to an Arduino. The clever bit is the Arduino program. Also, because I needed to be able to tune the frequency quite precisely, I used two potentiometers for the frequency - one for coarse adjustments and one for fine. Only the top 6 bits of the coarse potentiometer's measured value are used (otherwise the fine potentiometer would be useless due to the jitter). The remaining 10 bits come from the fine potentiometer, yielding a theoretical 16 bits of frequency resolution, giving a range of about 3.8Hz to 250KHz.
The video would probably come out better if I connected multiple LEDs to the output, but I only had one white LED to hand.