Project Excalibur - Next Generation LED Thrower (many pics) - UPDATE 2018-01-24

Very well done! From concept to application, brains to brawn as it were, and success in the end to make it all worthwhile!

Michael, your machine work is excellent and I hope one day to be able to get at least in the ball park, still on the learning curve with the lathe and now in a long delay from surgery but very ready to get back out there!

Mill work is beyond me for now, but obviously it’s the necessary other half to lathe work, combined there’s simply nothing you can’t accomplish and I love seeing it presented! Thank you both for all the effort , quality stuff right there! :smiley:

This must be the farthest throwing LED+reflector flashlight in existence right?
:stuck_out_tongue:

BTW to prevent your lenses from cracking in the future I would suggest buying some adhesive neoprene tape that’s 1/32 or 1/16” thick, then cutting a thin strip and putting that where the front bezel holds the lens.
It basically acts like an o-ring, putting soft pressure that isn’t too concentrated, and it creates a waterproof seal.

It has adhesive on only one side, so it won’t stick to the lens and make it hard to open.
If you want you can also put some on the other side of the lens, so that the edges of the lens are sandwiched between two layers of foam.

Very nice project and a great write-up. Great job, Michael and The_Driver!

Amazing build , nice nighttime bomber searchlight! :smiley:

So it is 1,5 milion candela reflector light and once when we’ll have commercial available LE UW Q8WP Osram emitters it will even surpass that results.

I am blown away by this. simply wow.

Very nice outcome, & I enjoyed the detailed build post.

I can appreciate how difficult it is to focus such a large reflector on such a small point!

I think I’ll have to update one or two of my throwers with an Osram black…

:+1: :beer: :beer: :beer:

I might have missed it but a few questions:
1 what is the depth of the reflector /or/ depth led mounted inside the reflector from the top?
2 what is this black thing in the center of the lens?

The LED is a 3V one right? Why choose this complicated driving engine?

Can you / do you want to give an estimate on the costs of this monster?

Thanks for the tip, we will take a look ;).

Concerning “the record”:
As far as I know this is the farthest throwing portable led flashlight which has a single LED with a reflector. Thats also what I meant when I wrote that it’s a lot of work and rather difficult to reach even higher values with this kind of light.

The farthest throwing led flashlight with multiple LEDs and reflectors is Lumensteins Lux Monster from Xandre. It is much, much bigger though (plastic spotlight host)! With around 6000 lumens it is also more practical, the spot is much bigger. It used to have de-domed XP-G2s and produced 2Mcd with 2000 lumens. Now it does 1.6Mcd with 6000 lumens.

The farthest throwing portable LED “flashlight” is Photons “Scheinwerfer”, it has a very large spheric lens and does 3Mcd.

I would have to check, I don’t know exactly.
The distance from the focal point to the outer rim of the reflector is 9.4cm (this is what I mean with “maximum focal length”).

Michael drilled a hole into the center of the lens because I had further ideas on how to increase the throw. There wasn’t enough time to implement this yet and we don’t know if it will work at all. I will keep it a secret for now ;).

Yes, the LED is 3V (technically it’s almost 4V, the Black Flat has a very high Vf).

This driver is of very high quality in terms of the components used. I don’t think there is a higher quality buck driver for LED flashlights. That is one reason why it is so expensive (also because it’s sold in Germany and the guy is trying to make money with it). It has all the features I wanted (over discharge protection, “nerdy” status LEDs, possibilty of connecting thermal probe) and can go up to a last 11A. I wanted to able to upgrade the light with a better LED and be able to utilize it fully. Newer LEDs are able to take more and more current.

No, not completely. One reason is that I was lucky on multiple fronts. If someone else were to build the same exact light they would pay much more money.
Most importantly you need a large, electroformed precision parabolic reflector and a matching head with large diameter. Where are going to get that and how much will it cost?

If you ask Peakbeam Systems how much a spare head with reflector costs, you will probably fall off your chair as we like to say in Germany. :smiley: I have heard that they want around 170€/$ for just the glass lens!

- you need multiple Osram Black Flat LEDs for testing, not all are good (but we had more good ones than expected)

- the driver you can replace with a cheaper one, but it needs to be a buck driver (the Convoy L6 driver, FX-30, might be the cheapest, it does 5A from 2S cells, but I don’t know how well it works with 3V LEDs). Otherwise the mtn max buck driver would be a very reasonable option.

- you need a DTP PCB for each LED (for testing)

- you need a variable constant current source for testing (lab power supply)

- you need a way to electrically isolate the batteries from the center solder pad of the LED without negatively impacting the heatsinking (we used a battery carrier which I already had)

- you need a machinist who makes all the parts

- you need to anodize the outer part of the body and gold coat the contact plates

- you need a large UCLp lens (or other ar-coated lens)

  • you need somebody who has a lot of time and is skilled at building lights

You calculate youself what you would pay ;).

Thanks for the detailed answers.

Isn’t the large SST90 amp hungry at 3-4V? Big die?

Dang I hope you’ll be able to compare your monster to the GT when it is done, they are pretty close on a lot of sizes.

Yes the Luminus SST-90, CBT-90 and SBT-90 are 3V LEDs which can take high current (up to 18A). They are actually the LEDs which this driver was originally developed for, I think.

The CBT-140 and the new CFT-90 can take even higher amps, officially up to 28A, but probably even more.

Please do make a thread on your ideas!
I don’t understand how to “read” your graph yet…

My light was focused very carefully by running the LED at 30mA and shining it on a tree 30m away. The measuring was done in 12m distance (I originally thought 8m would be the minimum distance, so 12m sounded good enough).

Did you take a look at sma’s test which I linked to? He showed that 2.5m is the real minimum for the Olight SR-95 UT. What does your method tell you for that light?

I know that my conversion factor is not really based on anything, but 100m distance is something I have read in other places regarding the Maxabeam with it’s Xenon bulb.

The Miller, The plastic center is probably a plug covering the hole for the return wire in the original short arc Maxabeam

That super tight beam is sexy! I love throwers and I didn’t pick up this hobby for the sake of practicality!

This light is quite similar with the on-going BLF GT, and your beamshots can definitely satisfy our thirst of seeing the BLF GT beamshots lol.

This almost makes me want to build a big thrower light, very nice :+1:

The BLF GT has a very similar sized head, yes. But there are some differences.

  • The GT doesn’t have an electroformed precision reflector, is has a standard aluminium flashlight reflector (so it’s less precise, but has a higher reflectance)
  • The GT has 4 or 8 batteries, my light just three and also more mass at the head, so it will probably be much heavier
  • The XHP-35HI has 6-times the DIE size of the Osram Black Flat and 55 prozent of the luminance. So the spot will be much bigger, it will be much brighter overall, but it will not go quite as far
  • The GT will be factory focussed which is nice

Well known modder Vinz had a lot of difficulty getting a de-domed XP-G2 correctly focussed an an Olight SR-90 reflector (100mm diameter) a few years ago. He did manage to do it though and it held the “record” for over three years (900kcd). It originally inspired me to do this project. So putting the even smaller Black Flat into the even larger GT reflector might not work or at least be very difficult.

When you make a LED reflector light with such extreme focus, there are some unusual side effects. Many of you have probably noticed that most lights produce a slight donut hole when you hold them close to something.
Well, this light still produces a donut hole in 3m (9.8ft) distance!
You can see this on some of the beamshots, the beam looks “hollow” for the first few meters.

Here is a realistic white wall shot of the hotspot in 2m (6.6ft) distance:

Since you can’t see the corona in that shot here is another one with higher exposure (corona ist now realistic, the hotspot itself is overexposed):

The reason for this is the same as for the minimum distance where one can measure accurate candela values.

this is the most powerful light I have ever seen. congrats on the project! and thank you for sharing it.

I’ll have to repeat others in saying WOW!

Amazingly well done and very well documented. Bravo!

Truly excellent work from both of you. :+1: