2 channel triple S2+ with a UV emitter (and not a mule)!

Today I got to finish up my most satisfying recent project. What made it so satisfying you ask? Well that’d be the fact that the general consensus to the often-asked question “how do I make a UV LED work behind an optic” is “you don’t”.

It was also one of the most time consuming builds with such extensive mods required of the optic setup.

I started out drilling one of the optic cones out of the carlco and cleaning it up with extra fine diamond files (literally 5+ hours in this step alone. Note this is not the first optic I started working on, actually it’s the 3rd try). Next I filed the reflector down to about 50% of its original height and filed a couple flats where the remaining optic cones interfaced with it.

After that the mod was pretty straight forward as far as converting the driver and FW to be 2 independent channels, actually other than code changes that whole process was the same as in my red/white S2+ build.

I knew by the time I had the optic built a ZWB2 filter was not happening so I’ve got a Nichia 276A inbound to replace it, plus the drive current is just perfect and the nichia lack of visible output should make up for not having a filter.

Specs
White LED’S Samsung LH351D’s running at 2.45A
Chinese 365nm UV LED (for the moment) at 700mAh
Moonlight special V3 driver w/ 2nd channel 7135 output isolated
FW started as BLF-A6

Parts

My precious

White wire is UV LED negative

Another cool build, nice one CK. Is there a glass lens or is the UV exposed ?

Thank you sir! Yes there’s an AR glass on top of the whole thing.

Good ideas :+1:

Amazing. What kind of daytime jobs do you guys have. Pushing camels through the eye of a needle?

Nice work Ck. I take me hat of to you with the patience you went through just to drill the optic. :beer:

Nice solution to a problem that everyone has when figuring out UV-leds builds!

Today I updated to a LG 3rd Gen 365nm LED and stacked a second 7135 on THE UV channel. I also reduced moonlight about 25% (from 4 to 3, the lowest level it lights the emitters) in code while it was opened up.

I had planned on using the nichia UV emitter but I didn’t want to overheat it when it wasn’t even running just from the heat put off by the pair of white emitters. Also found it hard personally for me to justify it at double the price for less output and more work.

Not that I had any issue with it before but stacking the 7135 on the UV channel also gave a lot more surface area for the UV LED- wire to mount, made me feel better about the shock resistance of the thing!