Besides the driver swap, an important consideration is whether you’re working on a early version 1 or a later version 2 MF01.
Version 1 has 6 wires going to the leds and uses 6 volts.
Version 2 has 2 wires going to the leds and uses 18 volts.
If it’s version 2 you will have to cut traces on the mcpcb and add some wires to get it to accept 6v. This extra work for version 2 has to be factored in.
There is only one place selling them, IMR Batteries in Houston, and they are $18 each. Shipping was $11 for 2 of them according to DBCUSTOM. So not cheap, at least for right now.
That's a ton of power from even a single cell. May have to wait until next week and I am not seeing a button top so some solder blobs and these should prove to be trying to find somewhere to get my hands on a few dozen.
His FET driver is cheaper and higher power than his buck version. But I chose the buck version because I wanted to be able to maintain the lumens even on non full batteries.
Since I don’t configure the UI, the controls feels the same to me. I like it simple ramping like that.
Led board = mcpcb?
3S = the mcpcb is 3S6P so it needs 9 volts?
So the buck driver is 12v to 9v?
I thought that buck driver was limited to 6A at 12v or 9A at 9v. You are getting 13.5A to the emitters at about 11 actual volts?
Okay, I had to refresh my memory and work this out.
The MF01 v1 had 3 groups of 2S3P = 6v with 3 built in drivers, one for each group of 6 leds. Used 6 wires to mcpcb.
The v2 was 6S3P where all 18 emitters were wired together and needed 18v. Used 2 wires to mcpcb.
So what you did was convert the 6S3P to 3S6P which needs 9 volts and uses 2 wires to mcpcb? Correct?
This method requires less changes on the mcpcb?
You don’t get a big boost in output, but maybe you go from 12k to 14k lumen (xpg3) and it’s consistent for a long time until it drops out of regulation. So it’s not a big upgrade, it’s just more reliable and has a better UI.
The driver regulates output over the whole battery capacity pretty constant
I found recently a better p-channel MOSFET, which has less conducting and less switching losses, so I could increase the current a bit
But that FET has another footprint so new board would need to be made
Absolutely. Mf01 is worth modding… swap all 18 led to xpl hi, upgrade the battery carriers, and new driver… you get 16,0000 to 180000 lumen… those are focus lumen and all the lumen are in one hot spot unlike flood…
I completely agree. It’s the 219C 90+ Nichia CRI that makes this light worth modding or even owning. I really like the CRI on this because the colors do show up better than even the 80 or 90 CRI Crees. Tintwise, I prefer the XHP70.2 4000k 80CRI because it has less green.
Actually come to think about it, if you can put in XPL2 80CRI high bin emitters (not sure if it fits), I wonder if you can get it to pump out 22k+ lumens, in which case, that would be very interesting indeed in a very focused beam with good tint.