I don’t know anything about the customs fees or tax for the Netherlands. Maybe someone from there who has already received their light can give us more details about whether they had to pay a tax.
Mine came with registered shipping, not DHL, and just slipped through. If they catch it, tax is 21% of the purchase price, plus whatever the shipping company adds as handling costs, in case of DHL in one case that was 18 euro.
He has not responded to me in a day or 2, that is usually a sign that he is at lumintop or at least away from home. His VPN and thus internet access is seriously limited when it is not at home.
You have not been following its development on BLF these last few months? We talked about it here a long time ago.
It’s not a direct copy. It’s basically a bigger reflector version of the Astrolux MF02 or Mateminco MT35. They started working on it way back when they saw the interest grow during the GT development. It’s running a more basic UI that does 2.5A, but can not do 2A like the GT. So it doesn’t have that longer run time the GT has or the other cool UI stuff you get with NarsilM.
Chinese light makers are always copying and cloning each other. It is what it is.
A driver is what regulates the power between the battery and LED. Electrical current (amperage) is what controls the brightness.
A buck driver is a type of driver that takes a higher voltage and regulates it down to a lower voltage. This is the design in the GT.
Vf stands for Forward Voltage. In this case, we are talking about an led. This one is complicated. I’ll skip it.
GA is the name Panasonic/Sanyo gave to one of their battery models, the NCR18650GA. We tend to say GA for short. Or Panny GA. The Panasonic NCR18650B is called the Panny B for short, etc… The full name is too long to write.
Regulation has to do with the Buck driver design. If you feed it with enough voltage above a certain point, 14.8v in this case, it will maintain a steady output current. 4 fully charged 18650 in series (4.2v each) delivers 16.8 volts. As power is used up from the battery the voltage will also start to drop. Also, as you put a load on the batteries the voltage will sag down a little. Some battery chemistries tend to sag a lot, some a little. The added protection circuitry also tends to add resistance which can cause the voltage to drop more than if it were unprotected. So as long as the driver receives 14.8 volts or above, it can deliver the full 2.5A output to the emitter. This is called regulated output.
Once the driver voltage gets below 14.8v, then the 2.5A starts to drop. So the steady brightness level will start to taper off.