UltraFire AT-01: How Low Can You Go? x-D - Off topic mode now ;-)

#48 post in “How do you store your batteries?”

Some pics:

Sorry, just noticed there's no mcu (?), must be that hybrid HL6Eb 3-pin thing.

Okay, you convinced me. It’s genuinely crappy. :smiley:

...and is not the bottom of it .., just wait a little more and you'll see the return of 2 or 3 stages switches with only a limit resistor for the modes !!!

" Money , money , money , is the funny , in the rich men's world..."

Just got mine, yeah, craptastic.

Thinwall tube barely thicker than Al foil, all the other crappy things you mentioned.

Looks nice, though.

Those 3-pin dealies are the µC and FET combined. Thinking of just shorting 2 pins to get a constant-on function, no pwm, no blinkies, nothing.

This is a really common setup in cheap lights. Its all run by resistors and a cheap controller module lol

Lets just say its built to a budget lol

Maybe like 5-10 cents of parts on that driver?

Yeah, but even my SK98 was a nice chunk o’ metal for about the same price.

Yea i have a SK that is 6 years old now and its solid but still no shelf in mine lol. Maybe i got the dud one.

I have a friend who brought me one of those “police” lights with a kit. He said one of his customers had numerous people complaining that the car “charger” he sold them was melting and even starting to burn.

Before all this he had come to me wanting me to import a large order of lights but I said I wouldn’t do it because they were too dangerous. He thought well… how bad can it be. Now he asked me to check into it so I did.

The ultrafire 9000mah battery measured at 176mah!!! That’s measured with with my mc3000. I then hooked the car charger up to my power supply at 12v and plugged it into the light. Within seconds it was getting hot so I stopped the test and opened it up. This is what I found.

Now mind you, this is connected straight to the battery plus and minus. There is no circuitry in the light. Just one resistor between 12v supply and a 3.7v lithiumion battery.

I decided to run a test with a temperature probe. This was the temperature after 1min 15sec.

The best way to store this light is in the trashcan :smiley:

To much power for the resistor to drop so it gets to hot.

With rare exception, ’98s were notorious for hollow pills.

Okay, so these have the most genuinely garbagey switches I’ve ever ever ever ever ever seen. Flicker like crazy, flipping modes with each flicker, rendering the light completely useless unless you actually like pseudorandom flicker.

So, I bypassed the damned thing. Was trying to get a good look at the pads and pc traces underneath the silkscreen, etc., and didn’t see if the floating island from the 2 resistors was connected to anything. Figured the LED was connected to one end, and the other end I could bridge to that square pad that’s connected to ground. All I succeeded in doing is melting off one of the resistors. Said screw it, I’ll just solder the (-) end of the LED to that square pad, which’d be just crowbarring it across the 3×AAAs like one of those cheap-ass multi-LED lights. Worked.

Nice 1-mode light for mum, but still, even a direct connection like that, the switch was and is absolutely horrible. Took to a regular rhythmic bright/dim flickering like a heartbeat ’til I’d bap the switch halfway to reseat the contacts, then it’d glow solid. Off, on, off, on, off, on, etc. Sometimes the flicker, othertimes solid. Like I said, a garbage switch.

Wellp, at least this way it’s simpler for her, and if she knows enough to bap the switch to unflicker it, great. If not, well… hey, nothing I can do.

And yeah, a floating 20mm star on a thin thin ledge. Thinking a simple contact board with discrete resistor can limit current even lower for longer runtime. Eh, fully pulled in it’s nice and floody, so spreads out the light nicely.

The AT-01 isn't genuine, look up for it on UltraFire's website: it's UltraFake! :-D

Had a frustrating while one afternoon while inspecting the tail switch, ripping up the whole tailpiece with my dremel clone until I realized the thing was getting hot and I was losing my money and time abusing my tool.

Once you live up to certain standards it may be hard to step down if @#$% happens.

My brother asked me recently to upgrade his old incandescent Petzl headlamp to led, I started to think in a fully regulated LD-29 driver, proper heatsink, high CRI emitter, a couple of li-ion cells… my quote in parts was already close to $25, and he gave up. Something simple, just put a led lightbulb inside of it, power it up with alkalines and that's good to go… :facepalm: (sort of this he was initially saying).

Cheers ^:)

P.S.: buying cheap UltraFire? Better check out their homesite first…

Figured that once I saw it. UF makes some nice lights, and had plenty of “UF” clones of ’502s and C8s and such. Lots of differences in the logo, etc.

The Al-foil tube was the first giveaway. I’ve never seen any genuine UF light be that garbagey.

Yeah, get a Nite-Ize bulb and be done with it…

What is it with campers that they seem to looooove Pretzl lights? Is there something special about them that I’m just not seeing? Specs, style, etc., just seem… meh. And they pay good money for ’em.

This is the Petzl headlamp my brother bestowed on me. It's all plastic, freakin' everything. Reflector made of plastic with some sort of metal coating/surface treatment and then embedded in that threaded lens/cap piece. If I fill the stuff with water via the bulb hole, the water will remain there for ages. ;-)

It may be dumbass to ask if that is worth updating/overhauling. However, since I have one of these modified (4.2A and improved inductor) and unused drivers (pre-modded 3.6 unit reviewed by HKJ), it may be worth it. Looks like some work to do, though. The space inside allows for a maximum of ≈∅48mm heatsink inside, and ≈13mm of depth up to the reflector. Found this ∅47×19mm heatsink on eBay, it's a bit thick but not too much as the cap piece doesn't needs to be screwed all the way down.

Cheers

Eww.

Wellp, at least you know it’s water-tight…

Did some tests with the bugger. I had it modded with 3x R330s plus the stock 3x R200s, removed 2x R330s and an R200. Final driving current is set at ≈2.6A, which makes the 219B Ra9050 bright.

The bad crap is I don't @#$% know what happened to the driver, it has no modes, just high. With an XL4015 module I could measure nearly 60°C just over the emitter at 1.41A driving current, this means probably ≈95+°C at such high driving current with the heatsink in open air. Maybe I should remove the R330 sense resistor for just 2A of drive to limit overheating once the heatsink is inside the plastic sarcophagus, or maybe I should install something like an air intake, after all I plan on using it for nighttime jogging…

Cheers :-)