What did you mod today?

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

that’s a nice aluminium case! i like it
Good mod by the way

Thanks! This one will be fixed to a printing press. Often clear coatings must be applied to the labels which is difficult for the press operators to see and register to the images. A small amount of optical brightener is added to the coatings formulation (usually less than 0.5%) allowing it to glow when viewed under UV. This lamp will be an upgrade over the fluorescent blacklight lamps that we’ve used in past. Those tube lamps don’t produce enough UV to make some colors of optical brighteners to fluoresce.

Thanks, sure… Here’s the Amazon link.

The bandpass filter would be a nice addition. I looked at filters briefly a few weeks ago, but wasn’t able to find one with the correct dimensions or one that wasn’t outrageously expensive. Maybe there’s a ZWB2 film that can be applied to the glass window? I haven’t looked into that yet.

If this lamp does works well, I’ll have to assemble several more. Next time I can mix it up with the SST-10 LED’s and do a comparison. I’ve been wanting to play with the Luminus UV emitters since they starting releasing these less expensive variants.

Can you link the Luminos Emitter?

ZWB2 filters should be cheap availiable in rectangular sheets

Im home alone tonight so I decided to mod my H03 side LED because dont like red colour as it’s not efficient.

Blue colour

Green colour

white colour without rubber boot

:smiley:

i also made AA vampire light from plumbing parts fits perfectly (just plug and play) :smiley:

The light can run on dead AA bateries people throw in the bin and it will run about 2 weeks continuously

Forward clickie fit in perfectly.

no machining is needed :smiley:

Plug and play. Your either a genius or an idiot. :stuck_out_tongue: Hows the water leak? :slight_smile:

Hey MDsDNF

It’s not water proof and I don’t intend to put in water rather use it as night lamp to drain dead AA batteries.

Although I can silicon seal the gap and put O rings but too much hassle :stuck_out_tongue:

Sorry, I meant the water leak where there is now a hole in the wall where the tap was. :slight_smile: . Just me being silly.

Here is the head MRsDNF

Had a spare XP-L 3D from the Astrolux S1 and decided to swap it to the Lumintop Tool AA.

Here’s the ceiling shot of Eagletac D25a Ti CW and Tool AA with XP-L 3D. Sorry about the cell phone photo as it does not capture the true color.

Good tip Firelight2. I’ve noticed with some of my bypasses that the solder has worn and has flat spots, but not too much to be concerned. If anything, the flat spots seem to help with conductivity. But I suppose at some point, the solder will eventually wear away too much, and then it will start to wear against the bypass wire or the spring.

Made my first attempt at “De-Anodizing” a light.
I turned my black anodized A6 , into a shiny , black “highlighted” A6.

Nice, diggin' the black & metal.

I reworked the Olight TC-10 Ti spare battery case again today. It's been a few different versions, MT-G2, XM-L2

Now it is XP-L2 HD V4 3C 5000K 80CRI.

I filed out the tube to take a 16340 cell and enlarged the bezel hole for a reflector. I used a pill module from an OTR M3 with lighted switch this time, 2000k resistor feed for the green electronic switch LED. Still turns red when the LVP warning kicks in.

DTP 20mm KD MCPCB, magnetic tail with copper and lockout function. Around 730lm on turbo.

Made my first 3D printed lens cap. I want to make for every flashlight of mine above 35mm head diameter.
First I made one for my Emisar D1 because it is small and I not wasting too much filament with setups. I made 4 rings of the top 3mm to test fitment and then made the final product.
I think I will try to make diffuser for my Q8 but I need to use it with low power not to melt it.


Pretty dang cool Zozz! Like it! Does the name show up in a beam profile if you sine it close?

Yesterday afternoon I tinkered with my Q8. :wink:
Made some changes to the light to allow the use of 4 20mm SinkPAD mcpcbs and on these I re-flowed 4 Luminus SST-40’s. With 4 x 22ga ground leads and a single 18ga positive, the light makes 11,247 lumens at maximum, on 4 Sony VTC5A’s with copper button tops. Was quite a bit of fine tuning, including opening up the emitter opening in the 4 reflector cups. Lowest mode is just under 5 lumens, so it works pretty good for my purpose. I have TK’s latest Anduril with flickering candlelight and lightning displays. Gotta tell ya, lightning bursts from this power level are very impressive!

Through a paper yes but with pointing the light to something no. Even from 1cm it shows full green spot. Maybe if I made big difference in thickness of the letters and the area around them.
Now I made one for the BLF Q8 too.


It making the tint so so warm. I will design a diffuser to it.