What did you mod today?

So, cold slicing for SST-40, thanks guys, I will give it a try, I am not satisfied with my hot liquid dedome results.

DBC, I think you are using too much flux! There is too much gunk on and around the emitter for my taste.
When reflowing I am only using solder paste, after that I clean the led with 96% alcohol, that I do hot chemical dedome process,
when it’s done one more time alcohol bath, then distilled water bath, compressed air to blow off tiny droplets. Thats my workflow.

I don’t use flux at all. Kester solder paste. All of those emitters have been in and out of different lights, especially the middle one, it’s several years old and has seen a lot of abuse. I didn’t see any point in cleaning up anything before they get installed in the next project where they’ll get dirtied up again. For the record, the XM-L2 on the far right was not my doing. It accidentally got left in some serious chemicals for a couple of months prior to being sent to me. :wink:

Ah, that explains a thing or two. :slight_smile:

I use a Q-Tip saturated with denatured alcohol to clean the star before dropping in the reflector. :wink: (and the dome too, by the way)

Edit: That emitter with the darkened substrate on the far right was sent to me as a Luminus SST-40. I took this pic to show that it was indeed an Cree XM-L2 emitter, based on the substrate style, the markings, and the dots on the phosphor all being different. I sliced the SST-40 specifically to show the substrate more clearly, then tried it in my latest build. The output was great, but throw was down significantly and this light is all about throw, so the 40 came back out. It’s been tested in 3 other lights now, and for various reason’s it’s back on the bench.

I did a board with a MOSFET to eliminate the extra resistance from the external switch
size 16-17mm, for 16mm the battery holder fins need to be cut a bit

Ordered 9 boards from Oshpark
Will take some time to get here to Germany and assemble them

Annoyed with the low output with remote pressure switches for flashlight?

I use a MOSFET with a low gate voltage which gets full output down to 1.8V

The MOSFET is powered by a CR1225 Lithium battery with 36mAh should run easily hundreds of hours on

Aliexpress has cheap remote switches, you could dismantle for the cable and pressure switch, or one that fits your flashlight
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-remote-pressure-switch.html

With a reverse diode added it could be used as well to charge a button cell over a bleeder resistor on main driver

^ wow, nice job Lexel, if it works as planned I guess you will have quite some customers for it. And the switch will be as good as silent too I presume.

I’m still stuck with the bezel of my X7R… it has been freezed in the freezer, then heated with the hairdryer but nothing seems to free it :frowning:
I was frustrated so instead I put the 3*XHP70 in my X7 :

Thousands lumens of 80CRI 4500K goodness :smiley:

4500K with CRI 80 is a really sweet light source

My R50 got the same flavour with an XHP50 yesterday… Kiriba-ru sure got some nice emitters, at a nice price :smiley:

My first Smini. Emitter had to GO. Went with XM-L2 T6 4C on a 14mm Sinkpad. Was the Black with Cu body… Now it’s CRX inspired.




Very nice VW, very nice indeed! :wink:

That turned out awesome! Guess I need an other s1 now.

Thanks DB and Geuzz.
Just a heads up there is a silver plating under the Black (PVD?) I literayy had to hand file it off the entire light where the Copper is exposed. Sanded with 220 on up to get it to polish as seen. Was a lot of work but looks neat.

Cool :wink:

Very handsome, vwpieces! So the black in the grooves is still PVD-coating, this finish will last very well, should still look nice with a patina. :slight_smile:

Nice spring bypass.

One thing I like to do with spring bypasses:

Cut a small piece of copper sheet into a disk and put that on the end of the spring facing the battery. Having a bit of copper there helps protect the solder from friction. The spring bypass tends to last longer.

CRX Approved, Thanks!

The Bezel and E-sw ring were the Blue. I tried the warm sodium hydroxide solution and no joy. They are Brass. To my suprise, it wasn’t till polishing it that the blue came off. The Lye may have actually helped a bit. The original emitter MCPCB is copper but super thin. To get the thicker Sinkpad in there I filed the bottom of the optic shorter and reamed out the bottom hole with a 60* reamer to fit over the XM and sit on the pad. Bad thing is that changed focus and the Smini now has a Square Spot. Like a zoomie but big. Mostly only seen on turbo.

This thing will be coming apart again. Change some things and mostly larger guage wires.

Thanks djozz.
Yes the black is the original coating, pretty hard stuff. The flats polished again after getting sanding scuffs.
Waiting for Patina….

Here’s my first LED project in a long time. It’s a 50W automotive light bar I purchased from Amazon that I’m modding into a UV inspection lamp.

Luckily when I opened the light up it used what I think are Cree emitters with the 3535 footprint. This made it easy since I was able to remove all of the LED’s and the 5 buck converters and reuse the MCPCB with the Lite-On 365nm emitters. Some jumper wires had to be soldered down to run the LED’s in series, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Here I was testing out the LED’s. My power supply maxes out at ~31V, so only 8 of them could be tested at a time.

The datasheet shows a Vf of 4.0 @ 500mA, but here it shows it to be closer to 3.45V.

9 of the LED’s have a consistent color, with one of them being noticeably “whiter”. This whiter LED still appears to fluoresce objects as much as the others, so I won’t bother to swap it out.

I mounted an aluminum project box to the top of the lamp for the dimming pot. It looks a bit ugly, but it’s good enough for this project.

The heatsink is more than adequate. At roughly 17W for an hour the temperature only reaches 33° C.

The only thing holding it back now is the window. The one that came with the light bar was made of polycarbonate and blocked nearly all of the UV. I have a piece of Starphire glass at a shop right now being cut to the appropriate size. I should have it back this week and the lamp will be complete.

Nice UV-bar! What kind of inspection would you use it for?

(One of those LiteOn’s that I tested was 3.6V at 500mA, but there was a clear design change at some point, that may have affected the voltage too)

Nice UV bar can you link the LED bars seller?

Just thought if you go for sapphire glass why not a ZWB2 filter glass installed?

The SST 10 UV may be also promising with XPL footprint and low thermal resistance
just the important thing would be to see what kind of Wastelight the SST has, like the Lite-On or no like the Nichia