What did you mod today?

Just put together my first S2 triple. I used dedomed XPG2 S4 2B emitters and the carclo 10507 narrow spot optic. Nice large spot; I like it. Almost twice the width of the beam of my S2+ with XPL HI and narrow TIR. With a fresh 30Q it pulls about 9.5A at start and does about 2300 lumens and 26 Kcd.

I’m going to put a rotary dial in the tail to continuously control the brightness, similar my mod here.

thanks for the advice, unfortunately I am not that good at electronic, best I was able to do is to activate one FET by connecting Gate pint to Bat + (I measured that it gets same voltage as batt.in while in HI) this give me half amperage that is usually in HI mode, second FET was disconected, but the other FET has 3.3V on Gate pin while in HI mode and that 3.3V is supplied from one of the chips (botom right) and depends from what mode is activated and when I tried powering this second FET with external supply of 3.3V it didn’t work (FET started heating up but no light from LED).

Here is my rough schematics of FETs, maybe someone will see something here but for now this is out of my capabilities…

Hunter
One of the microcircuits sets the modes. I therefore suggested using a strobe. A repeating signal is easier to find with a multimeter.
Those. You have a microcontroller. It sets the operating modes of the inverter.
Modes are low, medium, high. They can be specified via PWM. Or by connecting in the feedback circuit of additional resistors with the help of FET transistors.
If you can find which one of the microcontroller’s feet produces a signal the SOS or strobe. Then you can apply the required voltage instead of the microcontroller (for example, 3.5V).
It should be just a EN signal allowing the operation of the DC-DC converter
I hope I wrote correctly … English is not my native language :slight_smile:

i change the emitter of nitecore EC4 to xpl-hi, change the MCPCB to DTP, mod the thermal resistor
too bad, the led was out of center, i may have to reuse the stock mcpcb
some interesting things i found
the driver uses STM32f0 32 bit micro controller, which is quite impressive to me( much more power than attiny 85, or any other 8 Pin Uc)
the driver when open connect has Vbat voltage on the output( which mean i can mod the XM-l2 to XHP50, or even xhp70, whatever you want)

Interesting. I was just looking at those a few days ago, wondering if they would work in flashlights. It would certainly increase processing power and onboard capabilities, at least, going from 8-bit MCUs to 32-bit. Not that we generally need more processing power, but IIRC it has a bigger instruction set than attiny, which could make some things easier. Like, if it has a usable divide instruction or floating-point, some things could be calculated onboard instead of being precalculated into tables.

This is what I’ve been doing in for the past few days. The mod will have two xpg3 cri 5700 and two nichia 219c 4500 cri. It will be powered by a one of a kind driver. An upgraded version of one of the best three channel drivers available with full thermal regulation. Can you guess what driver?

I don’t find much time to sneak mods in but today I found a few minutes to do this quick & dirty emitter swap on a Thorfire KL02. Even essentially serving as a spare battery holder I found it’s CW tint too harsh. I swapped in a Nichia 119A (3,500k I think?)

Given my time crunch along w/ the fact that my heatgun & dremel cutoff discs are all loaned out I didn’t fashion a good heat path for it. I had initially thought to put in a dual emitter in the light. However I ended up just going into my parts bin & grabbing an emitter pulled from somewhere. As the stock emitter has it’s anode & cathode similar to a luxeon I or III -> it took a little finagling to fit a Nichia 119A in it.

Given that this light will just serve as a battery carrier for me I’m not all that certain that I will spend anymore time on this light.

Here’s a god awful pic (I see that now. Sorry. But take my word for it. It’s tint is very pleasing to the eye.)

Well since I blew the XHP50.2 in the 47’s Ti AA, I installed an MT-G2 instead :laughing:

ok heres a noob question with the spring bypass is it because of poor contact or an electrical field problem with the coil .

I ask because I am seriously thinking of doing a hi power mod on a c8 just for wow factor I realise that heat will be a problem .

cheers D

Spring steal has resistance in it and will cause heat and voltage sag in high power mods:)

thanks it makes sense now so is it worth doing on stock lights like c8s L2 and the like .

I was going to change the driver and the emitter in a Thorfire C8S, but ended up with only swapping the emitter to a XP-L HI because they changed the driver to 20mm in the version I got :disappointed:

EDIT :

I was going to put a BLF X5/X6 in it , but the driver size put an end to that plan.

Here is the new plan : 20 mm boost driver from KD and a XHP50.2 :

Looks way better with the G2 too :slight_smile:

But things happened to the stock OP reflector…

Yup, I accidentally scratched it up with the burr from drilling out the hole so had to take off the coating with 0000 wool :blush:

Does this mean you can swap to a 6v emitter without driver modification/swap ?

Today I taught a flashlight how to see. It turns out that LEDs can be used to sense light if you run them in reverse. So, all I had to do was solder on an “optic nerve” between its brain and its eye (MCU pin3 to LED-), tell it how to distinguish bright and dark signals (auto-calibrate), and then teach it something like Morse code.

The upshot of this is that you can configure it by pointing it at a phone or computer screen and playing an animated GIF or something for it to watch. (eventually, haven’t written the app yet)

… and the compiled code for it is shorter than the text of this post.

I’m not really sure yet if it’s actually a useful feature or just a silly gimmick, but it was fun to make.

Nice :+1:

BLF should start protecting the IP we are generating here and file patents! Unbelievable amounts of progress we are achieving here, seeing flashlights, apps or screens to program lights, … before you know you can talk to flashlights directly.

So proud to be part of this community.

Patents for what, a flashlight?
Pretty sure that was patented a loooong time ago, lol.