What did you mod today?

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
3529

This is my take on a lantern attachment for he Q8. My girlfriend thinks it is ugly but I think it looks ok.

It is a 95-or-so% downlight which has advantages and disadvantages. When carrying it, very little light gets in your eyes directly from the lantern which aids looking around. When placed on a table it is a pleasant reading light for the same reason. But if you want to illuminate an area, it has to be hung up at some height because having it sitting on the ground it will just illuminate your feet. The light is way too cool for a camping light, but I plan to put 2700K 219C's in one of my Q8's anyway, so that will be my lantern Q8. I know that a camping lantern is aimed at low illumination and long runtime, but I do not mind to have the huge output of the Q8 at hand for illuminating an area if needed.

These are the parts:

I sawed a replacement lens out of 3mm clear polycarbonate sheet, the exact same diameter of the stock lens. Polycarbonate is tough and will not crack, and it is fairly heat-resistant. I drilled two 5mm holes in it, 17mm apart. The M5 screw heads will nicely clear the reflector then. Under the head of the screws a stiff rubber o-ring was put to waterproof the lens. The 95mm diameter hood is made of 3mm aluminium sheet that I hammered into shape over a 65mm diameter iron disc that I had around (from a speaker magnet I believe it came). The outside is painted with flat black heater paint, the inside I painted with latex wall paint. I'm planning on a nicer looking and more durable flat white metal paint, but the latex paint is what I had around and works well for thetime being.

Some more pics:

The latex paint does not look great but does the job:

The beam is fully captured by the hood, the leds themselves can not be seen from any angle, just some indirect stray light from the reflector can be seen:

The screw heads clear the reflector, they are positioned right in between the reflector cups:

The lantern gives an even and fairly diffuse illumination from the hood downwards, plus little light upwards which is stray light coming from the reflector and bezel:

Standing on the table, the hood is high up enough to produce a useful light cone for reading:

3530

I modded my On the Road M3 just the other day by stripping the anodization and polishing it up. I then swapped the driver for a qlite momentary driver, put in a 3000k xpg2 led, and a TIR reflector. Now itā€™s my favorite EDC light.

3531

Interesting work there djozz, looks very effective. Nicely done!

3532

Stripped and polished a Solarforce host and built a 219c P60 drop in using a Convoy driver with biscotti. Also stacked four additional 7135 for a total of 4.2 amps.

3533

Nice work :wink:
Hum, do the stacked 7135 chips work on that side of the driver? I thought they only would work in the interior part :person_facepalming:
Itā€™s much easier to stack them on that side ā€¦ :nerd_face:

3534

Thanks!

Yes, they work on both sides :wink:

It sure is easier on that side. Just remove the spring and youā€™ve got a lot of space to work with.

3535

Pretty much that!!! Next time Iā€™ll do stacking will be on that side, specially in a drop-in module!
Thanks andā€¦dang, thatā€™s really polished that one :wink: :+1:

3536

MB, the 7135ā€™s are a series, so they add gains wherever you put them. Iā€™ve had as many as 26 total 7135ā€™s on a Qlite before I realized it was more than the cell could deliver. :confounded:

3537

Thanks for the explanation Dale! The only examples I had seen were in the interior side, so I assumed that the gain would be better on that side! But now I understand it doesnā€™t matter that much as long as the process of stacking is respected (heat, solderingā€¦.)!

Eheh, 26 would be a bombā€¦if the battery allowed that! Maybe new batteries in the future can deliver the needed energy to sustain such draw :wink:

Thanks again :+1:
I like this :smiling_imp:

3538

I suppose a light that used 3 or 4 parallel cells could readily supply the ~9A+ 26 chips would deliver, so piggybacking such a driver into a M6 or SRK soup can style light would work quite well. Triple or Quad (or more) emitters would benefit from this.

In a piggyback situation itā€™d be wise to provide some heat sinking, like those silicon blocks, for the stacks of chips. :wink:

3539

It is not a first a question of the cell if it could reach 9A, It is first a question of the Vf of the LED at that amps and second how much the Voltage drop is on the battery. With one battery and a tripple or quad, 9A are not that problem.
A Emisar D4 with Nichia reaches more than 9A.

And The AMCs are not connected in series, they are connected parallel, thats why you can stack one on top of another.

3540

Sorry, did I say series? I knew it was parallel, man these drugsā€¦. Dr. changed things on me last Wed and Iā€™ve been groggy ever since, sleeping a lot more too. Bout timeā€¦

A Luminus SBT-70 can draw over 20A all by itself. And of course, triple or quad or more emitters will also carry a high current while still using 4.2V.

Edit: Noteworthy that the Emisar D4 with Nichia 219 emitters does what the cell allows it. 9A and more if using the right cell, or much less depending on cell choice. I used the SRK and M6 as examples because they are multiple emitter lights, with many SRK available in 5,6,7, 8 and even 9 emitter configuations.

3541

Iā€™m curious if the reflector is actually doing anything useful, in this setup. Have you tried it without?

3542

It does good things, quite some light that comes off the hoodā€™s white surface gets back into the head, and because everything is shiny in there almost all of it is not lost but is just reflected back out again for another chance to leave the light. But I agree that the shape of the reflector is of no influence on the beam/output.

3543

Nice mod djozz. Its very creative the way you have attached the hood. Had me thinking for awhile. :+1:

3544

Quite a while back, I modified my SupFire M6 to FET with 7 modes and reversing. It had XM-L2ā€™s in it and a lockout tail switch. Today I got some SST-40ā€™s in, so I swapped them in and re-flashed the driver (piggybacked FET) with Ramping firmware from TK.
Now, with a rested set of 30Q button tops, it makes 8866.5 lumens at the top level, 23.84 at the bottom. Thatā€™s over 3000 lumens increase, for swapping in a new emitter. Pretty sweet! :slight_smile:

3545

I finally opened my first D4 one too many times and broke a switch wire. Opened it up, took everything apart, soldered new wires onto the switch PCB, soldered them onto the driver, went to put the driver back in, and one of the switch wires fell off again. Those switch PCB contacts are tiny and fragile and hard to attach anything to.

So I got the switch out again, tried to re-connect the wire, and the pad refused to take any solder. While trying to fix that, I managed to melt the switch itself into two pieces.

Fail.

I eventually got it working again, but I had to sacrifice parts from a dev host.

It reminds me of when I made some anagrams out of a friendā€™s name. One anagram was ā€œAnnaā€™s having oatmealā€. However, it can also spell ā€œOatmealā€™s having Annaā€. It seemed fitting; she can pick one or the other depending on how her day is going.

Today is definitely an ā€œOatmealā€™s having Annaā€ kind of day.

3546

More fun with boost drivers and tint/emitter mixing today. Finished my Convoy M1 kiriba-ru quad build today. Emitters are run in 2S2P on one of Richards MTN Quad boards.

I have 4 different nichias, 219B SW45K R9080 in series with a 219C SM303 R9050, and 219B SW40 R9080 in series with 219C SM4070e R9050.

The result is a beautiful 3800k-ish beam with a bit of rosyness and no yellow at all really to my eyes. My favorite light Iā€™ve ever built actually. The beam on the 25mm Khatod quad optics is excellent as well, much nicer than the Carclo IMHO.

I have to thank Clemence for making these emitters available, kiriba-ru for making the M1 quad kit available, RMM for making the quad boards available, and Kaidomain for making a quality boost driver (H1-A) easily available. Wouldnā€™t be possible without their efforts too.

The white balance and exposure on the beamshot donā€™t do it justice, but the best I could do on my phone.

3547

Also because I didnā€™t post it in this thread last time, here is my previous mixed emitter build. Mostly done just to show off why I find boost drivers to be advantageous. It is a Convoy S2+ with a kiriba-ru triple pill, modified to accept a 20mm driver so I can run H1-A. Optics are Carclo 10507

Emitters are a Nichia 219B SW40 R9080, Nichia 319A SM355 R8000, and Cree XP-G3 30G 80+ CRI. Result is a 3500k-ish beam which is quite nice, and thankfully doesnā€™t exhibit the tint shift of the XP-G3 once blended with the nichias.

Being able to freely mix emitters regardless of Vf in multi-emitter lights is a game changer IMO, and is one of the reasons I adopted boost drivers for almost all of my multi-emitter builds now. I will be running series emitters whenever possible from here out.

3548

The H1-A isnā€™t for 6V emitters? 3pieces of 3V leds in series need 9V or not? Or you mod something on driver too?