Convoy L2/L6 modding thread

What color are you using? The white are definitely brighter than the orange. 50k sounds good for a darker color. White might need 60k or more to give what your describing.

The reason I originally soldered the resistor to the switch was so I could pull the switch out and do a quick resistor swap and not have to pull the driver.

Dang, I should have thought of that. Lol

Thanks Guys! :smiley:

SOOC Canon 1DsMkII w/50mm f/1.4 lens, f/1.4 at 1/15 second ISO400 Medium JPEG.

Edit: The background ambient light looks the color it does because I have 5% Limo Tint on our storm windows from when my wife had Migraines so bad. :wink:
Edit II: Just an FYI, the quilt on our bed was made by a group of lil ol ladies at her church when we got married, 14 years ago. Hand made stuff, just can’t beat it! :smiley:

This seems to be messing with my ramping firmware, holding the switch down to ramp then releasing it the light turns off. Makes it unreliable to shift directions for the ramp or even use the light. :frowning:

Normally, powering up the light at the tail switch gives a blink through the emitter to show power-on, now it might blink or it might come on the last mode memory. So, reliability has been compromised with these led’s on the same circuit as the switch.

Well that’s no good. Where are you getting power for the LEDs from?

One way to fix it for sure is to cut the traces from the 2 leds negative side so they don’t share the blue negative wire. Run a seperate ground wire for the leds. That way they are completely isolated from the switch.

I’ll have to look at the switch some more later because I have to sleep now.

That’s what I was thinking, separate the ground to the switch from the ground to the LED’s so there’s no disruption in the switch circuitry that toggles the ramp… Gotta figure it out cause now I really like that hot pink glow… :smiley:

Here’s a potential fix. Use the 2 pads on the back of the switch as led positive and led negative. You’ll need to use an exacto knife to cut the pcb traces around both negative LED pads.

Then run a small wire from one negative led pad to the other negative pad. Flip the polarity of that second LED so the 2 LEDs are in series. Then what used to be the positive led pad becomes the negative led pad. This let’s you use the pad on the back of the switch for a ground wire.

The only hard part is cutting the pcb. Running a tiny wire might also be tricky due to the small space.

thats not true
in a 1s Setting lets say the SMD LED draws 1mA and has a voltage of 3.2V at that current
on 4V Battery voltage the resistor needs to drop 0.8V @1mA
R=U/I=0.8V/0.001A=800 Ohms

on 2S Setup
on 8V Battery voltage the resistor needs to drop 4.8V @1mA
R=U/I=4.8V/0.001A=4800 Ohms

So if you use 1600 Ohms on a 2S setup doubling the resistor value you get about 3 times the brightness
I=U/R=4.8V/1600 Ohms=3mA

I had to cut a new piece of PCB with 2 pads for the resistor, (the first one collapsed holding it with hemostats to remove the resistor) I put a 75K resistor on in place of the 51K and now the light works just fine. The SMD LED’s are still bright enough, almost more than I like as they’ll glow pretty bright in the dark. Regardless, at 75K the ramping works fine.

Same camera, same settings, same position in the same room…

Cool. That’s a lot easier than modding the switch for a seperate ground wire.

Did you say that was pink? I didn’t know that was an LED color. I’ll have look again to see if I have some.

Yep! :slight_smile: I looked at what it would take, figured I’d try reducing the impact on the circuit first, might even should have gone with 82K in place of 75K but it works and I’m happy about it… if I see the ramping having any further issues I’ll just swap the 75 out for the next larger in my book and run with it.

Thanks for all the help, this will really aid in keeping the cells ready to go as I do seem to forget quite often and put it away powered up. No more! :slight_smile:

Yeah, those in the tapes I gave you that look hot pink, they end up a nice exotic purple or lavender when lit. When I was doing tail caps I’d use one of these hot pink and one blue, looked neat.

Edit: I got 160 LEDs in the package I bought, 20 of each of 8 colors. I clipped 6 of each of those and sent them to you. :wink: (at least I THINK that’s what I did…)

just a thought of mine, why not simply solder a 50kOhms tunable resistor on the pad?

then set the brightness as you wish

Word of advice? Make sure there’s a fixed-resistor as the minimum possible resistor you’d want. Otherwise, if it just happens to be near-0 when you first power it up… :eight_pointed_black_star:pouf!:eight_pointed_black_star:. Goodbye LEDs.

So if you want the range to be roughly 20k through 50k, you can get a 22k fixed resistor and use a 22k or 25k pot.

just deliver it at lowest brightness and full resistance, so the user can tune down

add a tiny manual, not to tune below 2kOhms for 2s and 500 Ohms for 1S light

thinking about modding my l2, currently it has a xpl hi led, is it worth puting a xhp70 into it?

Better off just buying an L6 IMO. Or the S70s is not bad as well for the price.

You will need a driver that fits. You’ll also need to enlarge the hole in the reflector as well as have a way to adjust it’s height. Otherwise you may have a donut hole shaped beam with the SMO reflector.

A sliced dome xhp50.2 will probably give you a nicer, smaller hotspot compared to the xhp70. It’s not as bright, though.

Is your current L2 not bright enough for you or is the hotspot too small in your opinion?

You can get the most out of that xpl with a FET driver.

If you just want a bigger hotspot, then the xhp50 or 70 will do that.