【convoy】H4 and B35AM options are updated

Using ToyKeeper’s firmware (either Bistro or something FSM-based) in the new models would give them some of the best UIs available and a huge advantage over the competition (at least those that aren’t also using TK’s firmware). A triple-channel driver at a convoy price would be great too.

FWIW, the S2+ and C8 already use Biscotti, which is a slimmed-down copy of Bistro. But there were some issues and miscommunications back in 2016, so some buggy drivers were produced. I thought that had all been straightened out long ago, but maukka got an affected light just this week… so I guess not. I’m hoping we can find a way to finally resolve everything. … and if possible, it’d be nice to do some upgrades too.

Not some. I have bought a few Convoy lights over the last years and have not seen a “fixed” biscotti driver in any of them, i.e. the desert tan S2+ that came out more than 1.5 years after the bug was discovered did not have a fixed driver.

Unfortunayely however fantastic the Convoy flashlights are (I’m a huge fan of them), it seems that Simon’s expertise and his interest is not the driver and that is a real drawback. He is offered help from BLF, you were doing a great job helping him with biscotti TK, but then he does not recognise the problems with the wrong fuse in the thousands of lights that he sells and moreover does nothing to fix it but decides that the drivers work good enough with the bug (IMO they don’t) :frowning:

This should work good with eliminating the donut hole in OP/SMO reflectors with leds like the Luxeon MZ or a Nichia E21 quad :smiling_imp: . Very exited. But it looks heavily frosted compared to the Zebralight lenses, I don’t know if this is on purpose.

@Simon if you have the chance to buy 3500K SST-20 emitters, certainly do it. From what I recall they have a rosy tint, combined with the not overly warm (white is still mostly white) CCT and high CRI and R9 this led could have a 219B light quality.

Convoy lights are mostly used by non-flashoholic people or muggles, however you want to call them, so the UI should be simple, Anduril would we way over the top. However I would love to see a Andurill “Lite”, scaled down to the simplicity of the RampingIosV2 but remaining the advantages it has over it.

If you remove the throw with a frosted lens, you also don’t need a 40mm reflector, the beam will be the same from a much smaller S2+ with a frosted lens. Only in specific illumination it is still handy because the shadows that this light casts are a bit softer than from a narrower light source.

@djozz
Could the frosted lens help to smooth the artifacts from a 3V XHP50?

I’ve bought some S2+ which did have an improved Biscotti driver (slower flashes when in config mode), so something was improved! I don’t need all the complicated settings, so I often bought the simpler 3/5 mode drivers, which have one big disadvantage: the audible squeal. It should have a higher PWM frequency, or twice as low! Now it resonates in the springs…

^ thanks for the information Convoylover, so Simon did improve the biscotti driver at some point.

Question for Simon then now: if I buy spare biscotti drivers in your aliexpress store at this moment, can I be sure that they have the fixed software?

This frosted lens looks like it will smooth out anything.

Including a lot of lumens. I think it’s too much.

Technically, not only for casting soft shadows, but to have the C8’s better heatsinking ability compared to S2, it is very useful to have a frosted lens in front of the reflector (if someone goes for a bit more powerful flooder).

I’ve noticed that Convoy’s Biscotti driver are locked (to prevent flashing), and some people already mentioned to make a cut with a knife on some pin number. I’ve tried doing the cut on a Biscotti driver, but still couldn’t flash successfully — it could be my “cut” wasn’t deep enough though.

I was wondering, if these bare Biscotti drivers can be fixed with a reflash?

May I ask which Biscotti .hex file to use for re-flashing affected Biscotti drivers (since I now have a few Convoys with Biscotti drivers) and fix the fuse issues or timing issues, if that’s possible?

Thanks for the info.

Though that’s a disappointing one. Please let me explain…
Most of my friends who actually use flashlights are backpackers. They tend to pick headlamps. Always plastic ones; Black Diamond, Petzl and such. Sometimes I try to convince them to get something brigher, more efficient, with better tint, tougher, with more battery….and I always fail because even 92 g of Skilhunt H03 with 18650 cell is a lot for them. Similarly skinny light with 18350 would have a chance. And one that allows to pick tube size - even more so. I see that H1 with 18350 will weigh roughly as much as Skilhunt H03 with 18650. I see little reason to use 18350 then…

Also - I’m a backpacker myself. And a weight weenie on top of that. I have quite a few uses for H1 even as it is now (most importantly: a worklight, after putting a TIR in it) but it won’t become my ultimate headlamp; there will still be significant uses where it’s just too heavy.

Anyway I fully expect that H1 will be on my list of lights worth recommending - but not to everyone. Significantly - not to most of my friends.

Yes. Just cut pin 5 and reflash it as usual.

I just bite the chip leg off the board

The one from Toykeeper’s Repository. (She’s the author :slight_smile: )
Edited: Corrected by TK in the next post.

I’m not sure the copy in trunk is calibrated correctly for Convoy’s drivers. Each flavor of driver has slightly different calibration values. The one I sent Simon is in the Convoy branch instead. However, it’s otherwise generally recommended to use trunk whenever possible, since it’s kept more up to date than individual product branches. It just might not have the calibration values set right for individual products. Those values are still only approximations though, and it’s ideal to measure each driver individually with the tools in the battcheck/ directory if you want things to be exact.

TL;DR: It should work, but the LVP activation point might not be quite right and the battcheck mode might be a little off.

Lucky i messed up the URL then. :person_facepalming: Cheers for the correction and info :slight_smile:

I did this a while back with some free diffuser samples. Works well with the L2 because it has a fairly thick lip on the reflector to hold it in place.

In my opinion Biscotti is what elevates the Convoy C8 and S2+ from great hosts to great lights that I happily recommend to non flashoholics. I’ve used a few Convoy Biscotti purchased from Banggood drivers myself and I haven’t had a bad one yet.

I’d rally like to thank you ToyKeeper for making your firmware freely available. The majority of my lights are running Biscotti, Bistro, or Anduril and I don’t think I would have got into the hobby if it wasn’t for the BLF drivers and your firmware.

The axes of the CIE 1960 colorspace are labeled “u” and “v”. Duv is “delta uv”, or the distance between two coordinates. As used in maukka’s reports, it’s the distance from the blackbody line at the correlated color temperature of the light to the actual color coordinate of the light, or more simply, how red or green the light is.

More than +/- 0.005 is a very large Duv - very obviously red or green, easily noticed even without comparison to another light source. A positive Duv is green, and a negative Duv is red. +0.0075 as seen with this C8/219C sample is extremely green such that the color of everything illuminated with it will appear distorted despite the high CRI.

Almost nobody here likes light that is very green. Some people like light that is noticeably red (and seek out rare LEDs like the Nichia 219B sw45k to get it), but almost everyone will be happy with light that is purely white (Duv less than +/- 0.001).