Talk about future projects and donation topic

Thank you, I thought it was too… as well as an important one.

Hopefully the person that has the money will either update the thread if the balance left is not up to date OR turn over the $486.37 so it can be used to do some good.

In reply to a post further back about computers.

You want fun with computers.
Try my decade 77yrs.
We started with pen and paper. Slide rules. Then calculators.
Then came games. then came 286 WOW. updated to 386 with a 5 meg HDD. and 5in floppy’s. super wow.

Thennnnn. Mr WINDOWS popped up. with a “mouse”. Quick. hide it from the cat.
No more keyboard and DOSS for everything. Just programming nowadays. Heaven.
Then Win 3 etc. The rest is history.
Linux for experimenters and Apple for. Who knows what??.
I don’t. it has nothing that turns me on.

YOU lot have it sooo easy. you could never envisage…
Plus internet that actually moves.
and is NOT connected to a ph line that’s “programmed” to drop out every ten minutes
to make them more money with your constant redialling. Yep that was real good.

Win 7 was good, finally. Then 10 backwards steps with 8.5. Whoops, forget that one.

Win 10. Really. is about the best there’ll ever be. It almost runs\repairs itself.
I still have all the sets. and WIN official CD’s. from DOS 5 (7 x 3.5 discs) onwards. Just for nostalgia.
Threw out the floppy’s they started to crack round centres.

We didn’t even have Biro’s in school.
Class prefect. powder ink mixed daily and a bit of wood with a Broad\med\wide. NIB on the end of it.
Pencils were the modern world. and the END of decent freehand writing.
That NIB and it’s two little end bits. Completely control YOU.
Look at a modern fountain pen tip. Remove the two little balls on ends of the tips.
THAT’s what we wrote with.

Everything was a “scrawl” after that.

Sorry. just a little nostalgia.
I have “LOVE” Tattoo’d on my left knuckles. compliments of a darning needle and that school ink.
with a snake round a sword on wrist above it. AH the old days . Dumb as. Probably still am hey.
and rambling. just a little . (old age). don’t worry. You’ll ALL get it I hope.
One day.

And remember. EVERY day… is a good day.
There’s ALWAYS somebody worse off than you. Right to the second YOU die.

Take that to bed with you. OK. and wake up to it.

Jeez. I just read that.

Really went on a bit. didn’t I. Sorry. Blame the numbers. 77 on 17th June.

I can’t believe an Australian posted a recap of early computer development without mentioning Trumpet Winsock, Sacrilege! It was the best TCP/IP stack by far, and a product of the land of Oz.

I remember Trumpet Winsock! That was about the only reliable bit of operating system functionality on my Windows 3.1 box, presumably because it didn’t come from Microsoft. Never knew it came from Australia, though - you learn something new every day :slight_smile:

Nah, don’t worry about it. Happy birthday when it comes :beer:

This part had me scratching my head. Are you saying that in school you had to mix up your own ink daily and dip a piece of wood in it to write with?

Definitely! I have a habit of visiting almost every open museum I pass by, and am always discovering new things, like the time I stumbled across the Joseph Priestley House in rural Pennsylvania USA. Joseph was one of the main proponents of your namesake theory, even after he discovered oxygen (and invented soda water), go figure:

Interesting guy, I dropped by the local cemetery to pay my respects after visiting his ex home. I’m sure he would have appreciated LED flashlights and come up with an interesting theory about how they worked, if he didn’t die too soon.

Sorry about hijacking the thread (a little).

There you go. a new thing every day.

In the ’40’s\early ’50’s we had “powder” ink. Mixed with water every morning and poured into the individual kids “inkwell” on the top of each kids desk by individual class “monitor.” (suckhole)

we were pre Biro’and Calculators in those days.
We had a 5in 3\8th round stick of wood with a loose collar round one end. Into which we pushed a “nib”
of differing tip dia’s (look it up on Google.) dip. Write. Dip. DRIP… write. etc.
we all had a sheet of “blotting paper” to stop it smudging too.

And math’s. each page had a line drawn down it at 2 thirds across.
One side of page. The answer. T’other side. the workings out of to get there.
IF the working out wasn’t right. you didn’t get a tick. (you’d looked at somebody’s elses hey)
and nobody got past Junior school UNTIL you passed the three “r’s”
Readin’. “Ritin’. ”Rithmatic”

It’s a shame it’s not the same today when you look at the modern Illiteracy that abounds.

Turn the electricity off. ANYwhere. Nowadays. and everything stops. Look at the girls at shop checkouts as an example.
NONE can count past 1-2-3-??
Modern education. on an individual level. Leaves a huge amount of. Lacking. In the real world.

Thank got we’ll (my generation) all be dead by the time those generations get to be in charge.

Hey Phlogiston (Haggis) No beer for me. I’ve got a nice bottle of 46 proof Taliskers Distillers edit., in cupboard.
I open a different bottle of Single Malt for every Birthday. (I’ve had a few to nowadays hey.)
So far. That Taliskers is my fav. Isle of Skye liquid heaven.

/\ Interesting & true…… :+1:

Seeing how Folomov does 18700 cell with a built-in powerbank gave me an idea….

Take a cell and a Folomov-like circuit. Like Folomov surely does, run a strip of metal across the battery side.
Add a simple aluminium head with:

  • light engine, a single board that has both the LED and the driver
    • don’t make it too powerful
  • E-switch
  • Fresnel aspheric lens near the LED for wide uniform beam
  • USB port

Then use some high-toughness dual-wall heatshrink to seal:

  • a back insulator plate
  • the strip from the positive pole
  • the battery-head connection

20 mm diameter, 75 mm length?

Pros:

  • small!
    • by far the smallest 18650 flashlight, close to half the volume of DQG Tiny
    • among the smallest 18650 powerbanks
  • lightweight!
  • cheap?
  • as always with BLF, superb UI
  • CRI90? 95? Why not?
  • any colour you like
    • GITD on most of the body? Should be doable.

Cons:

  • very cheap look
  • splash proof, not truly waterproof
  • not powerful

Note: Based on 21700 such light would be just as awesome.
Note: a lens similar to that of Fenix E16 would be great as well, but it may be unobtanium

It’s an interesting idea.
Would that be enough of a heat sink? I take it this would be a throw-away when the battery no longer holds a sufficient charge?

DQG Tiny has the same light engine design, heat goes through fibreglass PCB to aluminium head. This is enough for 850 lm with XM-L2. Tiny has a much beefier head though. And aluminium tube. And I suspect it may be already thermally stressing the LED.
I guess this light could do half as much.

Yes, I don’t see a way to replace battery unless you’re experienced modder. LED swap would be harder than with most lights that BLF does as well. That’s definitely a mod-friendly host.

A TIR would be more compact and have higher efficiency.

Efficiency - yes, a bit. Out of focus Fresnel nearly touching the LED would add like 1.x mm to the total thickness.

You can’t use lenses like that.
They need to be a distance away otherwise the light will reflect rather than refract.
Most of the light will just bounce off the lens at that distance.
Might as well make it a mule at that point because nothing will get collimated.

Thanks, that’s an interesting input. That would require this light to be a couple of mm longer. But still, seeing the propotions that Haikelite HT08 has (diameter to mounting distance) I see that such optics won’t be as large as a regular TIR. But likely larger than Fenix E16.


Ignore the blue line, that’s only for polarized light.
Usually you don’t want to do anything more than ~45-60 degrees incidence angle.
You’ll have a hard time finding any lenses with a focal length closer than that, because nobody wants to lose 25%+ of the light that’s supposed to enter the lens.
And that’s not taking into account all the light that doesn’t hit the lens in the first place, since LEDs emit in 180 degrees.

If you want a low profile optic that doesn’t waste huge amounts of light, it needs to be a TIR.
This is how olight gets a nice beam for their flashlights while having some of the shortest lights per battery size.
If you want shorter, a mule is the best option, even better if the LED is flat like an XPL-HI or black flat.

Nice, I knew that such charts could be generated, but I haven’t seen them before.
The way I understand the chart:

  1. To get real reflection-loss coefficients for a LED emission one would have to integrate that over the lobes:
  2. When a lens is far, it captures the angles which have low reflection. Light coming at other angles hits flashlight walls and is wasted.
    When a lens is near, it captures most of all light. The light that comes at low angles has low reflection, the light that comes at high angles sees significant reflection, the light at very high angles hits the walls and is wasted. Therefore a lens closer to the LED will have higher efficiency.
  3. Does your advanced calculator take that reflections into account? They apply to AR coated lenses as well, though I suppose the charts are different and depend on the coating.

Still, the Olight example is interesting. It’s of similar diameter to this proposal. It’s just as small as lights that use non-Fresnel aspheric lenses. So it’s maybe a couple of mm longer than a Fresnel aspheric. Quite compact and definitely feasible.

A better way of sealing: just mold a plastic around it. Not just melted plastic because temperature would be too high for the battery. Use something chemically setting. Much better look, much tougher, fully water resistant.

  1. Yeah, but you only need to consider 1 lobe since the lobe is already a 2d representation of the 3d light distribution (do not think of it as a 2d slice through the LED)
    So the total area of 1 lobe is 100% of lumens, The area of the lobe between 0 degrees and 60 degrees is 75% of the area aka 75% of lumens, etc etc etc

2) Correct, having a lens closer will result in higher luminous efficiency until the angle of incidence hitting the lens gets to about 45-60 degrees and then instead of entering the glass it starts reflecting off.

3) My calculators assume 100% of the light from the LED enters the lens but then is multiplied by an efficiency value to take into account the light absorbed or reflected by the lens.
It does not take into account reflection at large incidence angles, that’s something that is usually accounted for in the lens efficiency on the specs.
Unless you have angles of incidence greater than 45 degrees any losses from reflection are negligible.