Tint ramping already works in the BLF Lantern project. The code was written three months ago, and it’s pretty much just waiting on hardware details to get finalized.
This should also work for flashlight-style lights with multiple emitters, but it’ll either be limited to one power channel per tint like the lantern (so the lowest levels will be very coarse) or it’ll need a bigger MCU with more PWM pins.
So it’s working, but to make it practical for something like a D4 it’ll take more work. That would need a FET+1+FET+1, and the attiny85 doesn’t have enough pins. Also, the tint ramping math gets a little weird when it has multiple power channels per tint. The lantern design is much simpler.
An extra button could help, but it’s really not required. It’s pretty difficult to fit more than one button on most compact flashlight designs, so I prefer to fit the feature in on one button instead of two or three.
Tint ramping was a pretty small change in Anduril. All I had to do was create an extra “state” which resides underneath everything else, catching un-handled button events which fell through upper layers. Then tell it to handle a button sequence nothing else uses, or which almost nothing else uses… and like magic, every mode supports tint ramping.
In this case, it used “3 clicks but hold the last click” to change tint, regardless of what mode the light is in. It works in every mode which doesn’t already consume that type of event. So the interface, in general, is:
Click: On/off.
Hold: Change brightness or speed (upward, also reverses).
Click, hold: Change brightness or speed (downward).
Click, click, hold: Change tint (reverses).
It may be a little more complicated with one button than it could be with two buttons, but it’s pretty universal across the entire interface so hopefully it won’t be too hard to remember.
This isn’t used for the FW3A though. So far, it’s only for the BLF Lantern. Each FW3A is a single tint, so it has no need for tint ramping.
Is it too late to make the FW3A into a wifi hotspot as well? That’d give us the need for even another button and would be so cool in a flashlight. I’ll bet nobody has ever thought of that. That would rule.
I recall Imalent released a variable color temperature light a few years ago that sounded pretty cool. It had 2 emitters: one at something like 2700K and the other at 6800K. Supposedly you could smoothly change the color temperature of the light with a touchscreen slider. The light varied the tint by dynamically changing the output of each emitter, with the result that the light could output any color temp between the two emitters.
I wonder if someone could do something like that with a BLF light. Might be pretty cool.
Not everyone is aware that there used to be some flashlights controlled by Bluetooth a few years back. You could remotely turn the light on and off, adjust the brightness, change the settings such as strobe rate, the number of brightness levels, have “dico” mode, etc… It seems pretty cool, but the one light that I’m thinking of didn’t actually sell very well because the flashlight itself was not very good. Then you have the problem of the company needing to keep the app updated. Eventually you’ll lose the ability to control the light through the Bluetooth and then you’re stuck with a really expensive regular flashlight. Even in 2019, I’m not sure there is a market for Bluetooth controlled flashlights.
Im currently on the list for one light, i guess the xpl hi is choosen by default?
So i want one of each.
Please also add me to the list for one LH351D. Thank you.