Second Generation Silver Plated High Current Beryllium Copper Springs and 95+CRI SST20!

The springs have been ordered.

Will post updates as they come.

Wow I didn’t know the springs knew how to post on a forum! :smiley:

Yeah you’re right.

The springs have become so advanced that they’ve become sentient :slight_smile:

But seriously, with a silver plating and removing a coil from the large spring(which will increase the plastic deformation from 0,9mm to 1,3mm instead), we may be able to get even higher current from the dual spring array.

I’m hoping it makes a noticeable improvement in my BLF Q8 performance. I’ve made no other mods, but I’m using nice cells. I’m thinking about changing emitters to HI for a little bit more throw like the Sofirn Q8 but not sure of that yet.

I received my “early” 3500K SST20 leds finally. The mail went wrong and they came back to Blue and he re-sent them.

I reflowed one on a 16mm DTP board and frankly, I’m not impressed. I measured tints at 350mA but other currents do not significantly improve things. The CRI is perfectly fine (over 95CRI in all measurements) but the tints are not below the BBL but in most builds will be clearly above it.

Bare led measured straight from above is ok:

Same led measured at 60 degrees to the side:

Same led with small OP reflector on top (from an S9), the hotspot was measured:

So there is nothing rosy to measure, also when inspecting the beam from the S9 reflector by eye, I see the all too common tint that hints towards yellow/green instead to rosy. And as usual it is a fine tint by itself but when compared next to a 3500K 92CRI Nichia 219C beam it loses out bigtime.

This matches my observations of the 3000K from Hank. Either there are huge variations in the emitters or the manufacturer’s binning is wrong. Minus green filters make the tint much more acceptable (to me) and is the only thing keeping me from swapping them out for XPL-HIs or 219Cs. It’s a shame the tints tend towards yellow/green because I think they’re in a sweet spot of being relatively low price with high CRI and good throw.

I have a hunch that if you want less greener tint, choose the lower flux bin, since green is the one thing that will surely add to the lumens. I remember the high CRI 219C D240 bin being greener than the lower bins at least.

Yeah it’s a problem I’ve encountered too. Tint variation, even for a GA3 tint supposed below BBL, is quite large.

There are samples of the SST-20 3500k that are just on the BBL at 1 amp, while others are better in this regard.

This what halted me in my search for 4000k SST-20s and LH351Ds:
I need to order pick 5000pcs to customize tint bins, but without the ability to customize flux bins.

The 3500k from Mouser was a stroke of luck on my part, along with the 3000k sample.

djozz… what hardware did you use to get that tint reading in your test? It looks interesting.

A Gossen Mavospec Base, which is a handheld spectrometer targeted to the professional lighting market (but is bought every now and then by a hobby freak). There is similar devices around by Sekonic and other brands.

Cool… yeah I was hoping it was something much less expensive. :slight_smile:

I've read elsewhere that brass screws can be purchased for the Q8, and will also help get you a bit more brightness. I would definitely recommend XPL-HI or XP-L2 over the stock XP-L.

Oh man the DUV is very disappointing. I was hoping it will be -.008 DUV with bare LED so even with optics, it would still not be green.

BTW, I’ve been considering buy a spectrometer for a long while but haven’t yet because of the price. Maybe in the future I will. Why did you choose the Gossen Mavospec Base over Sekonic or any other brands? How does yours compare with Maukka’s spectrometer?

I’m not sure how maukka’s measuring setup is done, it is not a handheld spectrometer like mine but works via a computer, and possibly an optical fiber is used to collect the light.

And I did not do an extensive search for the best, cheapest or most versatile spectrometer (the Sekonic C700 is cheaper and more versatile, not sure about quality and accuracy, should be ok too), the Gossen spectrometer was recommended and sold to me by a dutch lighting company that also very friendly helped me with calibrating my luxmeter last year. Call me lured into this one :person_facepalming:

Handheld seems more versatile since you can measure any light source including ceiling light fixtures. I will look into the Sekonic. I also want it to have decent spectrum reader so I canuse it to help me minimize blue wavelength lighting in my bedroom. The E21A 2500k with majority red wavelengths seems to really put me to sleep compared with other lights Ive used at bedtime

Maukka uses something like this I believe:

See this thread:

Doesn’t seem much different than what djozz uses

You can find guides online to build a Do-It-Yourself spectrometer. It’s similar complexity to DIY lumen tubes.

Here’s some basic spectral analysis software designed to work with DIY spectrometer:

I don’t know if any of the Spectral Workbench contributors have developed a package to produce chromaticity diagrams or calculate CRI.

I want to ask if there is a ~eta on the springs? Last thing i read was that theay are ordered. But i did not read all the thread.

I think it’s expected to take the slow boat. So probably several weeks. I may be remembering wrong though. Maybe BlueSwordM will step in and answer.

EDIT: I was curious myself, so I looked back at the first spring order. Blue made the order and sent payment by 7-07 and had the springs in his possession by 7-30. That’s 23 days.

Yep. It takes quite a long time, especially since the springs have to be manufactured all at once this time.

Once I have any news about them, I’ll post about it.