Convoy L2/L6 modding thread

What pads are you using? It is a TA driver right?

Try using the bleeder pads for the LED. Do you have a lighted tailcap? If so then yes, that will screw with things. In fact that could get interesting to figure out.

Nope, just a little 17mm MTN driver board. I have a bunch of those and a bunch of Wight’s A17DD S08 boards. Richard had OshPark mess up on an order of boards where they covered the spring pad with mask. They worked it out but he had way too many of these to deal with so I bought em from him, I usually build one at a time compared to his hundreds so it works out for me. I don’t need the extra 7135 chip on a ramping e-switch driver anyway. :wink: I also don’t use lighted tail caps as they’re just a battery drain for me. I like draining the battery in other ways. :smiley:

What do you mean by “the end cap pulls off the resistor”?

Are you using a momentary switch like the one that comes on the FX30 driver that has the extra LED pads built in?

If so, then the polarity of the switch wires becomes a factor due to the traces on the pcb.

Normally it doesn’t matter which switch wire (red or blue) goes to ground and which goes to the “switch signal” part of the driver because it’s a simple contact switch. When you add LEDs, the polarity of the switch wires suddenly become important because the LEDs are polarity sensitive and share a ground wire with the switch.

Since the blue switch wire is a common ground (for 3 things, the switch, the left LED and the right LED) you want to make sure it’s going to a ground source. If it’s not, you need to swap the switches red and blue wires around where they make contact on the driver.

If you switch wires were backward then that might have been what caused your problem. You might have fed 3 or so volts into the switch positive trigger when its designed to only sense ground.

Polarity of the LEDs is also important. They need to be like this.


Now if your using a different momentary switch you’ll need to map out its traces on the pcb. I just used the continuity circuit on my multimeter.

Here is the switch from the FX30 again. All the blue dots go to the blue wire. Red dots to red wire.

Hopefully that will fix you up.

Received shipment of my Shockli 26650 5500mah batteries today. Came with a nice case, carabiner clip, & magnets. They don’t easily make in series contact, without pretty good spring pressure, 65mm long x 26.7mm. Not enough spring reach / pressure without using magnets, at the moment, although I was able to take tail amp readings without.

Got at least an extra +1.0 tail amp measurement (9.71 @ 4.20 volts) with my cheap setup using 6” x 10ga leads over the Keeppowers. They do make the L6 with TA Driver get warm, real quick. Hard for me to get good representative distant pics, differences are more obvious in person. I can fairly easily tell the difference at a 600 feet (200m) treeline. This night shot is 150 feet (46m) to center brush/wood pile & 250 feet (76m) to background trees (just left of the wood pike in bottom pic).

A is positive switch
LED positive are always on the 4.7k resistors

R1 is not populated as Narsil v1.4 does not support 2s LVP

For those that want to use a lighted side switch on the TexaS Avenger FET driver in the L6, here is the basic layout.

My “power on” led resistor broke off when I tried to put test probes on it to measure the resistance. I hope that’s not a sign that there was an issue with the solder paste. Update, I broke the resistor, paste was fine.

Since I’m running 2 leds in parallel I’ll swap that 4,700 ohm resistor for something double in size. 10k to 20k should be fine.

I never could get my meter to read the resistance across it.

Can you elaborate on this?

What types of things would the “indicator LED” show you? Something to do with LVP?

yeah the solder connection is not the issue with this resistor, its just mechanical separated, so the rest of its conductive end still sticks to the solder blob

thos 0603 are pretty fragile if soldered only on one end

Indicator LED on Pin 7 was added in Narsil v1.3
so v1.2 has no indicator LED feature

Indicator LED
When enabled, the Indicator LED can be used for the following:

- to locate the flashlight in the dark (Locator feature)

- to blink out the battery level

  • as a secondary indicator of blinking when the main LED blinks
    When the Locator feature is enabled, the LED can be temporarily turned OFF (only in Mode Sets), with the main LED OFF, 1 quick click followed by a click&hold til the main LED goes off. To toggle it back on, repeat the same procedure (OFF -> quick click, click&hold). Note the locator feature is turned OFF when the light is in Lock-Out.

Okay, so that’s why the left side of the resistor looks a bit shorter than the right side. The resistor broke! Lol.

That’s why I can’t get a reading from it. :person_facepalming:

I’m glad to know it’s not an issue with the paste.

I just got my TA driver installed. Everything works including the lighted side switch! Yeah, I’m 2 for 2. :smiley:

It’s pulling 12 amps with the Liitokalas at 4.1 volt. Yikes! It might be higher when fully charged. Maybe I should NOT have used 18ga wires? I need to tone it down a little.

The scary thing is after about 10 or 15 seconds I see the light color start to shift towards blue/purple. I quickly turned it down in brightness. Maybe the 20mm DTP copper star is having trouble with that heat? (EDIT, it was my copper shims, not the star or LED)

I tried my KeepPower protected 5200 and got 9.6 amps at 4.2 volts. No color shift seen.

I think I figured out the color shift I got. I pulled out my super thin stack of copper shims and tightened the star directly to the flashlight head. Now it seems to be working like I expect it to.

BTW, I added orange leds to the switch this time around just to be different. They are not as bright as the whites, but still okay.

Simple little video here for anyone interested.

That will do it!! :smiley:

“IF” it’s a N4 it will handle it, I have seen N2’s turn BLUE at 11.8-12+ amps! I have built many N4’s in that range that are still kicking 2 years going, a better re-flow, board, better thermal contact and grease, you will be OK!

Like Dale says, the devil is in the details!!

I test them outside the light on a sink both LED and driver and weed out the weak! It also gives me an Idea of what I should have when I fully assemble the light. If I don’t get close to what I tested, then I start to look for what could be the problem, usually a bad ground contact.

Your now in P2-1C territory!! :+1:

The 18 GA wires?

I think I’ll keep them for now and just run it at 90% or so. Once the batteries run down a little the heat will not be such an issue. Maybe later I’ll switch them to 22 ga or so.

It’s an N4 1A that I just bought from MTN.

I’d love to get a P2 if they weren’t so hard to get and expensive.

No the shims! Thermal transfer or lack of will kill the mighty XHP70 quicker then anything! 18awg is the standard I go by in my lights.

The P2-1C laughs at 12 amps, it Loves the 20700A’s force feeding it at just over 13 amps! Haven’t fried one yet!

Oh.

Did you get yours from Cutter and reflow them onto a better star? Wanna sell one?

Jason or KB, any idea what kind of numbers the L6’s are reaching with your 12-13 amp setups? SMO or OP reflectors?
Very interesting, and Jason thanks for the video!

I stopped chasing throw, but with my old driver with R082 resistor pruducing 5.7 amps (due to the KeepPower 5200 protected batteries), a cut down SMO reflector and sliced dome I went from a stock 481 meters to 678 meters. That’s 58kcd to 115kcd or about double the lux.

With just a swap to Liitokalas the amp draw went from 5.7 amps to 7 amps. That’s a nice boost.

Now I’ve got 12.6 amps so I’m sure the throw distance is much further now.

I put a new xhp70 in with the dome still on because I like the extra brightness even though it creates a bigger hotspot and I loose some throw distance. Maybe one of these days I’ll swap the sliced dome xhp70 in there just to see what the throw distance is. Maybe it will hit 800 meters?

I’ve also got a xhp50.2 that I can slice the dome off and swap to my KeepPower batteries to reduce the current draw. That might still draw too many amps, though. If I can keep it to around 9 amps I’m sure it would throw really well.

But like I said, I not too interested in max throw anymore.

I topped up my Liitokalas and did another amp draw test. It’s funny that the amps increase over the first 10 to 15 seconds then start to drop back down a little then kinda level out. I think a good 30 sec amp draw is right at 12.0 amps. I’m calling that official.

It weird how I got a little higher when the batts were at 4.1 volt, but I didn’t wait more than 10 seconds or so. So maybe it would have dropped down to 12 amps if I had ran it a full 30 seconds.

I’m doing a few basic mods of the two L6’s I own and logging the results, at various levels. For me, 8 amps, with the factory driver, and Liitokalas is about maxed out. I am now considering other options. This is why I’m asking about yours and Kawi’s results. Any lumen measurements?