I’m hoping to add momentary to the strobe modes sometime soon… I’ve just been really busy.
The plan is to make the light keep track of whether it was last used in regular mode or a strobe-group mode… and then momentary would automatically use one of those two. So if you want a momentary tactical strobe, go to the tactical strobe mode, adjust the parameters how you want, then turn the light off. Click five times to go to momentary mode, and it would do tactical strobe as long as the button is held.
This would also work in the other four strobe-group modes, though I’m not sure it would actually be useful to have a momentary candle mode or momentary lightning mode. It’s just easier to do all of them than to do only one or two.
That would be a great feature. Also, if the strobe mode could remember the last used ramped brightness, as per the tactical mode in Anduril, that would be great too. If that UI was in an 18650 light with a single XP-L and smooth reflector, it would be the ultimate flashlight for light painting!
Oh, er, BTW… the strobe brightness isn’t adjustable. It’s hardcoded to use full power on FET+1 lights, or use the highest regulated mode on FET+N+1 lights. So with the FW3A, the strobes run at about 800 lm.
This is, of course, adjustable if you modify the code.
Lightning mode pays no attention to FET vs regulated modes. It spans the whole brightness range… at random.
Looking at it now though, I did find a small bug. The range is level 2 to 143, but it was intended to be 2 to 150. So I just fixed that.
It won’t hit the highest level very often though, because it’s random with a low bias. This makes most of the flashes less bright, and the really bright ones only happen once in a while… like in a real storm. When I was writing that code, I had an actual lightning storm outside for comparison, so I adjusted things to look like what I saw out the window.
@StephenK — excellent work! I’m intrigued by your results. On your site is there a video showing a little of how you produce these?
I used to work in meteorology while serving the USAF. I observed many lightning storms. I have to say, the FW3A lightning mode is very convincing! I’m very curious to know what kind of mathematical randomizing formula you came up with for it. Naturally, real thunderstorms can have long gaps between lightning, so yours are shortened a bit for user satisfaction. But it’s nicely done.