Remove the dome and you will like the beam even more. Crees love it.
Very interesting comparison right there robo !
There is more light at the center clearly , which many times is nice to have …
Clocks.
I needed a clock. Banggood had some neat clock kits. Soldering each pixel individually was a bit of a pain, but now that everything is assembled, it looks nice.
The dot-matrix one had 6 pads per LED, and 105 LEDs, or 630 total pads to solder on the front side. It took a while. The other one had 216 pads on the front, IIRC, which also wasn’t the fastest process ever.
Stock photos for context:
DIY a nixie tube clock
Where you get it from, steel? I see many ussr-made components.
Today I got the Q8 MCPCB from led4power so I reflowed four of my favorite XM-L2 T3 7A3 CRI90 emitters in a my Q8:
’
I used a washer with two cut outs to clamp reflector to MCPCB :
The holes in the reflector was reamed out to fit this XM-L centering ring :
It was as reasonably straight forward mod, without any difficulties.
When I fired up the Q8 it wasn’t the nice tint I expected instead the beam had a green hue completely unlike the tint of the XM-L2 T3 7A3 CRI90 in the other flashlights I put it in.
Convoy M2 XM-L2 T3 7A3 CRI90 (left) BLF Q8 “XM-L2 T3 7A3 CRI90” (right)
One of the emitters have the “normal” 7A3 tint the other three have a green tone.
What a huge disappointment, and the next problem will be how to explain to the seller I got three emitters with different color :weary:
That is a bummer khas, those emitters are supposed to be super-nice! 
One thing to check with your Q8, even though the tint difference between leds points to a led problem: is the lens AR-coated? That coated Q8 lens totally spoiled the tint of the LH351D leds in one of my Q8 lights, the non-AR coated lens of another Q8 made a world of a difference.
Ooooh, where??
I like nixies!
I have also tried it without the lens no difference, I don’t know if it’s worth the hassle to try to get a refund
Yeah, I ordered some 2000K car-bulbs just to scrounge the LEDs from them… and didn’t even to think to light ’em up before wanting to use them.
Evil cold-white LEDs (probably 7000K), not 2000K.
Missed the piss’n’moan date on AX by about 3 days, so couldn’t even grex about them, piss’n’moan to the seller, nothing.
@khas, ask for a refund. This looks like a bad U6 4C XM-L emitter.
@djozz, was it the original Q8 AR lens that some people received or the Kaidomain AR lens?
Was the seller KD? The ones I got from them were good sofar.
I referred to the stock AR lens that part of the Q8’s came with. I did order a KD replacement lens because it was said that it did not alter the tint as much but I did not receive it yet.
Oh ok then. Now I get why there were no AR lens for the Q8. Too much bad tint shift.
Those are really nice, and I miss the one I used to have, but nixie tubes are expensive… especially if I want a proper ‘5’ which isn’t just an upside-down ‘2’.
However, I’ve been tempted to get some nixie-like 16-segment VFD tubes, and connect it over USB for use as a general purpose 8-character display. I haven’t found any kits for that though; the closest was a clock which doesn’t talk to the USB host at all.
My Q8 had AR coating. I scrubbed it off, but it took a few hours with a polishing cloth. Tint was much better afterward.
Here’s a shot from halfway through that process. It was reflecting a big yellow light source, so the yellow parts were clean while the rest was still coated.
Yes it was, I have bought eight in total only three has the green tint.
I have four more on the way I just hope they are the real ones.
Thanks to Texas_Ace
my Utorch S1 Mini NW LED:
Now has an N219b 4500k 9080
fwiw, lumens dropped by 50% and the light now runs noticeably hotter (dont have any IR temp data before and after, but I speculate its twice as hot, inverse of the lumen reduction)
neither the piss yellow of the XPL, nor the excess violet of the N219b are noticeable “in actual use”. The differences are only obvious when comparing different beams side by side.
This is seriously functional art! I love it!!!
I modded a Sofirn SF10 with a BLF A6 driver and a XP-L in 5A. I also tried baking the light and I like how it turned out.
