Convoy L6... XHP70 Beast!

Lexel, after reading your post, I think I can confirm that I am still in the dark ages when it comes to electronics. You sure put a lot of research and work into this project to make it work, hats off to you.

The simple Layout without a voltage regulator is shared on oshpark

Those work great with 2-3 colors that have about the same LED voltage or you will see one LED type getting dimmer with droping cell voltage

you can find them here as well a lot other shared stuff

The ones with balance resistors for each LED are better

Here is the driver. I don't see anything out of the ordinary as to why the light doesn't work?

BTW, I unscrewed the star with the LED on it thinking I need it to expose the driver more. Now I know I did not need to do that.

Anyway, the star came off the heat sink with some silvery grey powder residue. I assume I need this paste before putting

the star back on?

Good the Leads and switch wires are still attached, I have had LED leads/Switch wires either break or come loose due to cold solder joints.Can you hook up a 2S 8.4v battery set up to the driver and see if it works, now the driver is clear.

I probably could but I don't know how

I have a quite a few good 18650 Laptop pulls so I soldered 2 in series and then soldered leads to the ends for quick portable Brewster Projects home boy testing. :smiley:

I like your setup, good old fashion engineering Is there any easier way for me to test the driver though?

You could ring it out with a DMM, check for ground short, ground ring on the driver to the driver spring. E-switch should/could blip once, but if it is truly grounded out will continue to ring.

The battery/power set-up is just easier to check the whole set-up. You can remove the leads from the star and check the LED off the battery set-up too. Just don’t over heat the LED it’s going to get HOT real fast!

Ok, I will run a few tests and see if I can figure out what is going on there. I'm going to watch a few how to youtube vids first just to make sure I know what I am doing.

I touched the LED + and - terminals briefly with a little 9v battery that I wired up and the L6 led lights up, so I don't think there is anything left except that the driver died for no reason unless anyone else has any ideas? BTW what paste is recommended to use to mount the the star on the heat sink?

Try to jiggle all the components of the driver to see if anything has be unsoldered from its pad.
Also set your multimeter in Ohms and check the resistance between the power wires.

I did jiggle everything but except for the spring bypass wire which disconnected from the spring it looks good. I unsoldered the star as I want to replace the driver since I have a spare but the side switch which is connected to the driver by two wires only goes out from the front. Does that mean I have to unsolder the side switch wires as well? The joints are so tiny on the switch, it wouldn't be easy. Is there another way?

You can either file tiny notches as seen here or file the sides of the switch pcb flat. Both work.

Very helpful thanks. Got to go to the hardware store now and see if I can find such a tiny file as I like the idea of filing the head in case I do future mods.

The top and bottom of the hole are thinnest and are easy to open up. The sides are much thicker.

Thanks for the tip. Just getting at it now so that really helps.

Got the new driver in and it works now, but it stays on turbo and the side switch does not work, only the tail cap switch works?

Update: I found the problem and got it working. I see now that the old driver would have been fine too and I did not need to swap it but at least I know how to do it now. The problem was that on my functioning L6's, there is a white round plastic ring around the emitter to keep the reflector high enough not to touch the contacts. My one is missing the white ring and that explains the on and off problems with this one. I pulled off the reflector and everything works. I put it back on and it goes haywire. I need to somehow find that ring and if I'm lucky Simon may have one.

The negative wire from the emitter is shorted. Try loosening the driver ring and move it around, then tighten it back up. The reflector isn’t touching the emitter wires, are they?

I just updated before you posted. Problem all along was a missing ring around the led and you're right, the reflector was touching the emitter wires! Finding one of those plastic rings may be not so easy though.

Glad you found the problem.

I couldn’t find those spacers anywhere. I think Simon is the only source.