FW3A, a TLF/BLF EDC flashlight - SST-20 available, coupon codes public

This is madness.

An attempt to impose some sort of “democracy” on the design of a torch ?

Then further noise about what a particular sort of democracy means, with algorithms ?

I’ve lead several over £20,000,000 projects as Engineering Manager and can assure you that “democracy” never came into it.

Whereas listening to the discipline experts, facilitating, summarising, then taking a view, making a decision and pulling the teams together works.

Surely there is someone in the team who can absorb our chatter, condense it, summarise, propose a few scenarios, review with the manufacturer if they are not on the team then make a decision and get on with it.

Otherwise it’s just a bunch of egos blowing hot air and achieving nothing. Slowly. Wasting opportunity, time to market, and potentially over-taken by superior products from wily and agile manufacturers.

I’d be exasperated if I was the manufacturer and had to deal with this nonsense.

Sorry if I sound grumpy, but I am.

Don’t think it’s to be taken as seriously as a £20mil project. But that’s just me.

The choice of emitters for a 1xLi-ion FET triple doesn’t have a right answer. It has a number of wrong answers, but the LH351D, 219C, XP-L HI, XP-G2 and XP-G3 are not among them. All of the emitters proposed will satisfy the engineering criteria to make the FW3A a reasonable flashlight. There’s no reason, in theory they couldn’t offer all of these emitters as options. The Emisar D4 offers three of them.

So all that’s left is personal preferences. Since a bunch of people are eager to buy it, why shouldn’t their preferences be taken into account? A poll will only take a week or so to run and is unlikely to hold up the project significantly given the general slow pace of things.

Finally, nobody is likely to steal the idea and beat Lumintop to market at the target price point. There’s not a lot of room for profit there. Most of the flashlight companies tend to screw something up without someone from the community holding their hand anyway.

Yes sir Fritz!! It is your design & I still like it as well or better than the original. :+1:

Thank you for the pictures as well as your design…… :beer:
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I like that…. a win is a win.
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Very interesting comments indeed. No need for an apology either…. you just seem to be getting your two cent’s worth & preferences in like everyone else.

I think you covered us all quite well when you mentioned “…… it’s just a bunch of egos blowing hot air……” :+1:

I really like that… you hit the nail on the head! :smiley: . :beer:

New prototype looks perfect. Hope it ships exactly like that. I won’t get involved in Emitter/Tint/CRI Madness. If emitter choice is too awful for me to bear, I can swap it out myself for minimal time and money.

Keep up the great work ya’ll.

I am the list for one please add two (2) for a total of three (3). Thank you.

Prototype looks amazing. As for the emitter choice I think this light doesn’t need to compete with DD triples in terms of output. I rarely use my nichia D4 because it gets extremely hot too fast and then drops to an absurdly low level and takes a couple minutes to level up to a decent level, and because there are no preset levels or hidden turbo its practicality is very poor.

Business is business, the same rules apply. When something like this carries on interminably, either write it off as R+D (which you can add to your books as an asset, like “goodwill” but better, even set it off against tax), or keep it going as some sort of marketing research that might become worthwhile sometime. It’s not as if you are having to pay for the voluntary engineering and design work, though keeping the knowledge.

If you can make and sell some, all the better, makes it more legitimate. Even at a loss (deductible).

At least that’s how it works in the West.

If we consumers get something from this, that’s a bonus.

I hope we do, it is still very interesting to me, possibly the best EDC I’ve seen.

Cynically yours, Tom Tom.

Proto2 showed up today. Fritz already posted some pictures, but I’ve been doing some tests and measurements.

Several things were fixed compared to proto1:

  • Tail end of the body tube is now tapered too, which is nice.
  • Tail updated to Fritz’ latest design.
  • Tail parts are no longer glued.
  • The clip ring no longer sticks out wider than the body.
  • The clip is straighter. (my first prototype was bent in as if someone squeezed it too hard)
  • Driver has raptor claw 7135 chips, not failboat chips. :slight_smile:
  • The LEDs come on at level 1/150 now, at 0.2 lm. Output and clock speed are stable, and it has no missing levels.
  • Uses 10511 optic instead of 10507. This makes the beam pattern smoother, even with XP-G3.
  • Has springs on both ends of the battery now.
  • No longer reboots at the slightest bump; the springs are stronger.
  • Ano color is consistent between parts now.
  • Inner tube has thicker anodizing, and is now black.
  • Comes with the latest firmware, so a bunch of bugs were fixed and features were added.

There are still a few things left to do though, like finalizing the surface finish, deciding on the emitter type(s), improving isolation of the inner tube, and adding some finishing touches like extra O-rings and hopefully an optional traffic wand diffuser cone.

Oh, and it seems the light is 92.5 mm long, not 94.8 mm. It’s quite small.

You might be happy to hear that this has a few differences from the D4:

  • Regulated output up to about 1100 lm
  • There is a good chance the emitters won’t run as hot as the D4-219
  • Thermal regulation is smoother, less prone to oscillating, more configurable, and has a higher floor
  • The ramp ceiling can be set lower than turbo, and by default is set to the highest regulated level
  • Preset levels are available too, and are configurable to whatever you like. The default is about 10 lm to 1100 lm, in 7 steps.
  • Other practical improvements have been added, like faster access to lockout, and momentary moon during lockout. Direct access to the ceiling level from off. Predictable ramping direction without having to remember anything. Plus a bunch of extra modes and extras.

Thank you for the info TK, it is sounding good. :+1:

blf

I don’t think anyone is sitting around, delaying the light while we all decide what kind of emitter we want. This is all just people talking, feeling good about their reasons for choosing a tint or type of emitter.
In the end the scrolls will be carefully handed to the manufacturer with the results of the emitter poll and they’ll say “Huh? oh, no, we got a good deal on some 6500k emitters that almost look like Cree made them. Thanks anyway!”

You’ll notice Fritz posted some pics of the latest version and it’s looking great. Or terrible because it doesn’t have swarf and burrs hanging off of it.
(Swarf and Burrs will be the name of my soft rock duo.)

These folks are not some fancy engineering managers ruling over a 20 million euro project with an iron hand and a grumpy heart, they just seem to be drawn here while they await the coming of the special, daresay, Elegant triple.

This is going to be epic. EPIC!

Damn, this light is sounding really nice. Good stuff

I’m interested in 2 lights, thanks.

I did a quick thermal test just now. With the XP-G3 emitter it came with, and while holding the light in my hand, thermal regulation slowly reduced output from about 1080 lm to 800 lm, and then settled at about 800. The change was too smooth to see by eye, but it showed up in my light box. Then to make sure it wasn’t just the battery sagging, I held the button to ramp it back up to the ceiling, and it went back up as expected.

Results might not be so gentle when using full FET turbo though. It’s recommended that people treat turbo as a burst mode for brief use only, and don’t expect it to throttle itself gracefully when at full power.

Before testing, I calibrated thermal settings:

  • Navigate to tempcheck mode. It said the current temperature was 29 C, which wasn’t correct. This is expected though, when it hasn’t been configured yet.
  • 4 clicks for thermal config mode.
  • At the buzz, 20 clicks to tell it the current temperature is 20 C.
  • Optional: At the second buzz, 20 clicks to tell it to set the thermal ceiling to 50 C. (30 C + N clicks) (optional because 50 C is the default)

That only needs to be done once, and then it’ll remember.

Just told my brother about this and I need one more for him, thanks!

Voting is open for emitter details:


- TK

Sounds like things are progressing very nicely. I’m getting exited. I’m glad to hear they got the message about gluing things together. That’s a concern I had.

Domeless led has obout 20% less LPW than led with dome.