I’ve tried measuring the current when the 18650 is housed in a similar kind of battery holder. I think the battery holder’s springs plus the thin wires are causing a massive drop…
The GT mini manual was printed before the “official” manual was sent to lumintop IIRC. So this manual is one they made without really understanding the details.
The stock BLF Q8 (and it seems even the currently-produced models) come with NarsilM v1.0
(can be updated to NarsilM v1.2 — I wonder why they didn’t do so from the factory, for this bestselling light;
which fixes the strobes mode to be cyclable)
The BLF GT comes with NarsilM v1.2
The Lumintop GT Mini now comes with NarsilM v1.3
What is changed between v1.3 and v1.2 of NarsilM? Is there a changelog somewhere?
(I notice the Fireflies ROT66 also just comes with NarsilM v1.2 ; any other factory-produced lights that come pre-installed with NarsilM?)
I guess you could say Thorfire is lazy and/or doesn’t want to risk the newer version having a flaw or issue. So they just leave it as it is. It’s works fine as is, it just lacks a few features. It’s also possible that they need someone to tailor M v1.2 to work reliabily on the Q8. I’m not sure.
I don’t know if there is a changelog between M v1.2 and M v1.3. I don’t think any features changed, it was mostly cleaning up code, tweaks, etc… that the user will not see. M v1.0 to M v1.2 is where we had all the changes that the user notices.
Lumintop contacted me and assured me that they do not buy fakes to save money and said “it is impossible to buy fakes of these we think”.
And to be honest, I don’t disagree with them. It is a strange thing to fake that is for sure, I find it hard to believe there would be a big enough market to make faking this worth it. Particularly when the savings would be so small.
They are looking into what is going on with them, I know they had trouble finding the tiny85 is china at all (along with every other manufacture that has tried to find it pretty much). Them simply being old stock from 10+ years ago is both very possible and probable.
I am not sure what is going on with the MCU myself but I do trust them when they say they did not know about it and they sure did not try to buy fakes. They simply have never complained about the price of doing something the right way when I insist on it, why would they do that with something so important and also so cheap?
I re-flashed the mcu on the prototype they sent me and it worked outside of some connection issues at first. After some alcohol cleaning of both the chip and connector it worked. The flux / solder they use does seem to have some kind of film that makes getting a connection difficult without cleaning.