Used to work for a small manufacturer as a designer. We did short runs of our parts in house - mostly prototypes and high-urgency components - but mostly bought from machine shops and sheet metal houses. I was quite frequently reminded that as many hours as I would put into designing and documenting a part as a design drawing, a vendor would then have to put a similar effort into a production drawing specific to their equipment, run prototypes, then optimize their own workflow so as to balance setups verses delivery schedules. As a smaller outfit, we ended up back of the line and/or buying larger quantities than were ideal at times just to get parts made at all or with a predictable delivery date.
I don’t know what Lumintop’s production volumes are like, but I suspect that a run of ~2000 is on the low end for a custom design with so many unknowns relative to their own doubtlessly higher-volume products.
Then again, I only heard about the FW3A about two months ago and signed up … yesterday … so I’ve not been anticipating for anywhere near as long as everyone else.
Hi. I’m the one who took that picture. I also wrote the code for both the D4S and FW3A.
It’s no longer soon-to-be-released; it started shipping a couple weeks ago.
Nope.
The D4S has three power channels:
3x7135 (0 to ~400 lm, regulated)
FET (~400 to ~6000 lm)
aux LEDs
The FW3A also has three power channels:
1x7135 (0 to ~160 lm, regulated)
7x7135 (~160 to ~1100 lm, regulated)
FET (~1100 to ~3000 lm)
Adding aux LEDs would mean redesigning the driver, but we don’t have someone to do that any more. And redesigning the MCPCB. And it would mean sacrificing some other feature to free up a pin… or switching to a bigger MCU. These things aren’t going to happen before release.
Also nope. That’s a complete host redesign, which isn’t the planned direction after this project. The FW3A is aluminum, FW3B would be brass, FW3C would be copper, FW3T for titanium…
If it were up to me, I’d make the next one a single-emitter model with 18350 or 16340. Basically a clone of the Olight S-Mini, with better emitter choices and fancier firmware.
Me too.
I hear Lumintop has CAD files for proto3 though, and is working on manufacturing it. In theory, this is the final sample. So hopefully that can get approved without any further issues and then production can start.
A single emitter for the next version would be great. I’d still prefer 18650 though. Nonetheless, it’s very premature. I’m still looking forward to this one. I think it will be worth the wait.
But the 2000 is not your typical production run of a new product, which would normally be speculative and require marketing effort.
In this case the 2000 is guaranteed sales, the product is already known to a large audience, and there is guaranteed ongoing discussion of the product to a wide audience independant of marketing efforts. Sounds to me like these factors make this one of the least risky ways to take a stab at a new product. Unless it has major flaws which are not solved soon after launch it is practically certain it will be a success and sales will continue well beyond the 2000.
I don’t know what the ultimate over/under is on BLF special editions, but there’s typically some falloff between initial hands raised and committed purchases in these sorts of ventures. I imagine that they’ll all eventually sell even if some of the original pledges walk away, but I Wouldn’t take that 2000 figure as guaranteed sales.
I’ll agree that a project like this is probably free market research for any manufacturer that takes on the project and indicative demand outside of the BLF market.
If I recall correctly, people were keeping track of follow-through rate on the Q8 project. The main issue was that the manufacturer couldn’t keep up with demand, not that people didn’t buy what they pledged for. I think the follow-through rate was something like 95% before the purchases opened up for general audiences, and then it has continued going up since then.
Other projects have mostly gone that way too. So it’s probably pretty safe for Lumintop to make 2000 units, especially if they do 1000 each of two flavors.
Perhaps it is possible to make such leds without MCU. I think it could be done similar to the illuminated tail-switch on the BLF X6 e.g.
That means hard connected to the battery.
Sure, it’s no different that hard wiring leds into a side switch. The problem with doing it on the FW3A is the much smaller mcpcb. You’ve got the same four emitters, but a much smaller board to put them on and you still need room for the optics to fit over the top, so space will be tight.
I could be wrong, but I think I rember:
Lexcel did design an aux LED-board for the normal D4 but could also be the D4S. I think the D4 quad has the same diameter of the optik than the triple FW3A.
Based on a lighten tail switch.
Please search for it
