What did you mod today?

That is a very nice compliment, thank you, i will keep that in mind :+1:

Was about to finish a 3up XP-E2 Convoy S3, but my cheap china-programmer refused to work…

Connection test gives me : “could not find USB device with vid=0x16c0 pid=0x5dc vendor=‘www.fischl.de’ product=‘USBasp’ ”

It’s strange because I didn’t change anything. Had it working on Windows 10 some days ago. Tried two different drivers, both with the above result… Don’t know if I need a new programmer or if it’s a software/driver related problem. :frowning:

I get that from time to time, usually just unplugging/replugging the usb programmer fixes it for me.

I have been tweaking my light canon, and I’m ALMOST at 1.5Mcd!!!
Sooo close… 61000 lux at 4.9m = 1.46Mcd…
I will post pics when I get to the magical 1.5!

I tried that a couple of times. Don’t know what else to try. Will ask google, hopefully right questions…

Nice achievement Enderman!!! :+1:

USB 3.0 ports give us trouble with printers and such at work sometimes…especially with Windows 10…I’d make sure it’s plugged into a 2.0 port.

It’s USB 2.0. Don’t have a 3.0 port on this machine.

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: thanks!
I am very excited lol

I’d be quite excited too, Enderman! Must be a crazy beam you got there… :smiling_imp:

OK. I managed to get my programmer working again. YAY!!!

I’ll explain the steps I went through in case someone has a similar problem it might help…

  • Opened the device manager, found two USB Universal Host Controllers show the yellow exclamation mark sign (Code 43 error)
  • Right clicked and deactivated (not deinstall) both of them
  • Restarted my laptop
  • Went back to the device manager, right clicked and reactivated them again

That did the trick. So if you experience similar issues, I hope this helps and it’s as simple as that for you.

Gonna flash some drivers now. WOOHOO! :partying_face:

1.5Mcd!!! :exclamation:
Waiting for the pics! :+1:

Truly awesome Lux numbers, looking forward to seeing pics of the light and set up.

For what it’s worth, Canon is a registered trademark of a camera company, your use of the word would be cannon, as in long thrower. :wink: (just a bit of OCD coming through, right is right, after all)

Wouldn’t a light “cannon” project a large diameter beam, like the old aircraft search lights? Maybe I need coffee… sorry

Wow!! Congrats on this site unseen project! Try a reading at 10-15 meters, betcha you will get over 1.5 easy... I think every light I've tested at 5m got a nice little bump at ~12m, plus it's actually more accurate.

I agree he meant “cannon” (simple typo) but “canon” is not just a camera company:

Sk68 died a smoking blue death (single mode with liion cell) so I pulled out the pill and reamed the hollow shell to the OD of 1/2” copper pipe(.625”). And made up a copper insert. I might go old school and direct solder an XRE since a sinkpad would raise the die out of focus.

Thanks guys :slight_smile: I actually made a mistake in my calculations, there’s a thing called etendue, and due to this the formula 1/r^2 doesn’t directly apply to my light because of how it is almost collimated…
The farther I take the measurement from the light, the more lux @ 1m I get.

The correct way to calculate it is by using this tool: Candlepower & Divergence Calculator For Uniform Beam Lights or you can do a bit of trig to manually figure out the distance behind the lens
This means that I’ve always been underestimating my measurements, and I might be getting actual candlepower in the tens of millions….
I need to make new measurements at a longer distance, and measure the diameter of the spot to figure out the real number, so hopefully in the next week I can actually tell you guys the real numbers :smiley:

Yes, but there are so many “light cannon” named lights I wanted mine to show up on google search, so I named it “lightcanon flashlight” so that it is pretty much the first result :wink:

SHHHHH let’s pretend it is what I said above

The last emitters I bought to dedome died under direct drive, I think they were U3’s?

What bin of XP-L’s are known to be more “durable”? I know the W2’s on Aliexpress are an option, but I’m not sure I want to spend that much yet

The XP-Ls are new cree production. with the really low Vf, so pretty much any bin in direct drive will die from too much current.
You need to use a current limiting driver for these, not FET or DD :confused:

I’m really not sure what you are talking about. I have heard zero reports that XP-L’s suddenly have a lower Vf. Unless you are talking about XP-L2’s?

This is interesting. The details of this are not often discussed. I think for largish diameter lights this definitely makes a significant difference in how we would calculate the throw (cd).

I think you explained it fine; this is just some further explanation of my understanding of the subject. The inverse square law, which we use to calculate the cd, is valid for a point source of light and the distance in the formula should be from the point of light to where you measure. With flashlight beams, the light appears to come from a point behind the flashlight, not the face of the flashlight, and so this effective distance should be used in the formula, (cd)=(lux)(d^2), instead of just the distance to the flashlight.

Something bothers me about that calculator you linked, though. It implies that (with all other things the same) the size of the emitter affects the divergence distance behind the aperture. This somehow doesn’t seem right to me. I did some quick tests with my UF 1504 lens light. To get a more accurate measure of this effective divergence distance, I measured the beam size at different distances (2.5m, 4.2m, 10.2m from the lens), then simply graphed the points and drew a line through them. The point at which the line crosses zero is the effective point from which the light is emanating. I did this with two different sized emitters, the dedomed old XPG2 and the XPL HI, and got equal divergence distances behind the lens, 2.5m. This means, effectively, that the beam size is not the size of the lens at the lens. Anyway, I don’t understand all the implications, just wanted to put it out there.

Mitko and DB custom reported the W2 would do ~6.6A on direct drive, so a bit lower Vf. But I haven’t heard they are dying from direct drive.

Did you have a U3 XML2 or XPL?