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