I can’t speak officially but I have had several people message me so I figure I will tell you what I know about the driver situation.
Yes, as several of you guessed, Terry and then Haikelite brought me in to look at the drivers issues with the MT09R.
After some diagnostic testing and a bit of luck I found that the extra capacitor that was for some reason stuck between the LED V+ and the LDO was the cause of the issues. Removing it seems to have solved the flickering and “tailcap” issues. Although it is not a perfect fix, it does seem to work thus far. I still want to know why that was put there.
Haikelite then asked me to start from scratch and design a driver for the MT09R. I have been working on it for the last 2 weeks. It will be a fairly simple TA FET based driver for simplicity and reliability. With a few tricks like dual FET’s for more current handling if needed (only one will be populated from the factory I think).
It will also have some extra voltage spike suppression control built in to handle the massive currents it will be dealing with.
I got the first prototype built Friday and have been tweaking the firmware and driver ever since. It will naturally be running REAL NarsilM 1.3 which is light years better then what the stock drivers had (only the S42 comes to mind as being worse in recent memory I am sad to say).
In testing so far it is working great, FAR FAR better UI and performance as well. I swapped out the xhp70.2 LED’s for some 80CRI 4000k emitters and I am getting 23k lumens peak out of it now. It is also pulling around ~40A of current at 6.6v, for over 250W of power!
Needless to say it gets silly hot so almost a full day was spent tweaking the thermal control settings to keep the heat in check. Sadly there is no way to do it “smooth” with this much power, it can go from 55c to 65c in under 15 seconds. So there is just no time for a nice ramp down. It just drops the power in a big hurry.
It works though, in testing even with my mega light it will reach about 55c and then start stepping down and usually the overshoot tem is still under 60c, which is “Safe” (aka, your reflexes should be plenty to keep you from burning yourself).
The driver will just be a single channel FET driver for production I think as the 7135’s have proved unreliable at 6V. It becomes a bit of a lottery, some work and some don’t. Only way to know is to try it which is not production friendly.
That said I talked with Del and I am making a V2 of the driver that could improve the 7135 reliability. It still needs to be tested though.
The 7135 will gain you a lower moon mode, smoother ramp in the low modes and better efficiency in the low modes. If you do not use the low modes much, then the 7135 will not do anything for you.
I will be selling some hand made and tested drivers with the 2 channel 7135 design if anyone is interested. I just need to figure out how many to build.
I have to say, I really like this light once it has a good driver. I can see it getting a LOT of use.
That said I naturally always see ways to make things better. I have been trying to talk Haikelite into making a “TA” version of the MT09R to my specs but they have not really acknowledged it yet.
I think they are worried it would cost more and people would not want to pay the extra for it….