The SYNIOSBEAM - CFT90 recoil thrower

:smiley:

Cool, I haven’t seen any of those laser lights yet in videos or IRL.
Nice to see companies exploring technologies other than LED :slight_smile:

Maybe for a forward-facing reflector is is not, since the distance of the reflecting surface from the LED varies between very close and very far.
If you measure the lux in the spot created by an aspheric flashlight (the projected square) the lux is the same at all points, it is not higher in the middle.
So this suggests that light does not need to be coming directly from the center of the focal point.
A recoil reflector is somewhere in between a lens and a forward-facing reflector, in terms of distance form the LED and die projection sharpness.
Maybe you are correct in that case.


Renders coming tonight! :slight_smile:

PROTOTYPE REVISIONS


Revision 1 was designed using a 12” diameter 4” tall cake pan as the chassis. The low cost of the cake pan would have made this project a lot more affordable. However, this design was ultimately scrapped due to the lack of rigidity of the steel used in the pan, which would not protect the expensive mirror very well.



Revision 2 was changed to use 1/4” thick aluminum for both the body tube and the bottom, and was an intermediate stage in the design. In this design the reflector was held in by aluminum rings. To make the rings, two large 12”x12” aluminum sheets would have to be used, which was not very cost effective and would give difficulty in mounting the reflector rigidly while not damaging it.



Revision 3 was the runner-up to the chosen design, and uses a flat carbon fiber sheet to hold the LED in the center. This sheet would have similar rigidity to 1/4” thick aluminum while having less thickness and weight, since the original goal was to make the device only 4” thick. This design was not made due to the extra cost for the carbon fiber, which would cost approximately twice as much as aluminum. Carbon fiber would also increase the complexity of mounting it to the chassis, since holes cannot be drilled into the side due to delamination.



Revision 4 is the design that was chosen to build, and more renders can be found in the following section. This design also focuses the light by adjusting the position of the reflector, rather than the LED block. Due to it’s use of 1/4” aluminum instead of carbon fiber, the total height had to be increased from 4” to 4.25”.



Revision 5 was design to move the LED block up and down for focusing, rather than the reflector. The down side was that the glass would have to be removed every time the light needed to be focused. Mounting the LED cooling block within the arms and securing it also posed additional complications.



This design was made to fit a Turnigy 3S 65C 6000mAh LiPO battery pack, which I own several of and are used for other projects. Having a universal battery I could use for all my projects was appealing, however for this light, the goal was to keep it at around 4” thick, and using this battery added 1” of thickness. Another down side was that it complicated mounting of other internal components such as the reflector, but it also had the benefit that it allowed for a second cooling coil.



The final 7th revision was designed to fit many extra features, such as a built in LiPO charger, AC/DC converter for continuous operation, variable current power supply, and multi-pole switch. Not only would all these features added several hundred dollars to the design, but the thickness would need to increase to 6” which would no longer fit in a backpack for portability. Potential future prototypes will include features like these, however the first prototype will be much more basic.

RENDERS















What are these rendered in?

Almost all of them are 2d exported images from sketchup (free)
The last one is a real render done in solidworks.
I made a solidworks model after sketchup because I needed a way to make the drawings for the waterjetting and assembling the components more accurately.

No fins inside the water block?

Way too complex to do, also not necessary for such low power LEDs.
Making microfins in there would probably make the blocks cost like $1000 rather than $100.
It might have helped if I decide to put a CFT90 in there later, but the project was already nearly 1.5-2x more expensive than I wanted it to be.
I could have probably gone with aluminum instead of copper to lower cost and still get decent performance, but what’s done is done :slight_smile:

You don’t need microfins. I remember people were cutting them in CPU blocks with a hacksaw. Finer ones would work better here, but it’s not something very complex to make…

Why does the reflector need a hole?

He does not need it, but the manufacturer delivers it.

While microfins or channels do reduce temps by some degrees, they are not needed. especially not if you are cooling just 10-15W.

I know that in the beginning of PC Watercooling we were cooling heavily overclocked CPUs which were also over volted to oblivion with simple aluminum blocks with just a round S-channel.

@Enderman
There is no reservoir visible in you CAD pictures. While bleeding is surely possible without one, it makes this task so much easier.

So awesome!
What about a handle or a tripod?

I like the space optimization, especially the copper pipe wound dissipation surface. Do you plan to secure the batteries in the carriers (i.e. velcro strap) to ensure they do not pop out if they encounter a sudden jolt?

The block is 1” diameter. That channel is only 1/8” wide.
Any fins that fit in there would be called microfins IMO.
The smaller the details, the more expensive the machining cost gets :frowning:


It’s part of the manufacturing process, can’t get rid of it.
It also doesn’t matter since that part of the reflector is blocked by the LED MCPCB and cooling block anyway, so it would be unused even if there was no hole.


Correct :slight_smile:


Yeah I wanted the light to be usable in any orientation so I skipped a res (which could introduce bubbles) and will just fill/bleed it using an external container, then close the loop.
I’m not sure how much of an issue evaporation is going to be, but I guess we’ll find out with this prototype :stuck_out_tongue:


Thanks!
It will have a handle on the side as well as two 1/4” tripod mounts, one on the side and one on the bottom for vertical or horizontal use :slight_smile:


That’s something I will need to consider, it would be bad if one fell out and hit the reflector.
I just checked and the batteries fit extremely tightly inside the carriers, so I don’t think there’s any risk of them falling out, but for any long plane or road trips I think I would recommend removing batteries.
The battery carriers do have a small slot on the side that seems like it would fit a zip tie though, so maybe a small design modification by adding small washers between the carriers and the base plate will allow a zip tie to go around the carrier and make sure the battery is 100% secure :slight_smile:

With a reflector you have some axial averaging going on. If you put a pinhole in front of the reflector, like the method you used to focus your lens, you will see that the projected image of the LED rotates as you move the pinhole around the reflector. So at every point in the beam there are some areas of the reflector that are reflecting the dark cross (in four-die LEDs). This is what causes the beam intensity to be reduced, even outside of the donut hole. Also, I think for most LEDs the die luminance is a bit less near the edges, and averaging these areas will further reduce the beam intensity. On the other hand, with a single die in a reflector the center of the beam consists of images of the center of the die so you get high beam intensity.

The projected image of the LED does not rotate.
It gets skewed/stretched depending on what angle the reflector “sees” it from, but it does not rotate.
With a lens, all the points are almost perfectly in front of the LED which is why you get a clear die projection, all the squares remain square.

I just tried it and it does rotate.

Edit: as you move in a circle around the LED.

I like your style Enderman. Very exciting project. I probably missed it, but are you having the reflector custom made? If yes, maybe they can quote a price for say 5 or 10 units. Maybe it would be low enough for some members to want to by their own reflector so that they could make their own version of this monster thrower. Of course you would want the manufacture to ship the individual units straight to the purchasers.

If someone wanted to go with a laser and remote phosphor, that center hole would be a wanted feature. Powerful blue (445nm) lasers are cheap, but they don't emit a pinpoint of light. Violet (405nm) would emit a nice pinpoint, but last I checked there are not any cheap high power versions of those available.

If you’re going to be using an XHP70.2, don’t forget that all 4 pins are brought out on the chip, +/~~ A and +/~~ B.

So you can have one driver power the A LEDs and another driver power the B LEDs.

Was gonna suggest…

If you want a nice stiff and fairly lightweight frame for the reflector, you can go back to the cake-pan, but use what’s called “gorilla hair” and epoxy resin, and make your own fiberglass casing for it.

I know people who are into car audio, and instead of using ¾” thick wood slabs for speaker-enclosures, would use thin plywood, then GH+ER to build-up the wood and make it rock-hard, no vibrations.

Messy as Hell, though. Staple/Glue the sheet(s) of GH to the wood (depending how thick you want it), then get it sopping wet with ER, and let it all dry.

Dunno if you have anything close to you that can supply it, but something like this:

https://www.clausenautobody.com/proddetail.php?prod=claw-glas-mat

https://www.clausenautobody.com/proddetail.php?prod=gorilla-hair

And the resin, hardener, anything else you might need.

If you want the outside to still look nice and slick, apply the stuff to the inside of the pan.