Nope, thatās above my pay grade. I donāt get information like that.
I sent a new build though, and I think the drivers are getting made in a few days, and I think I heard the 219C model might ship in a week or soā¦ maybe it could end up with new firmware?
Anyway, the build I sent includes the following updates:
Rewrote the thermal regulation. Should be much more stable now.
Added momentary strobes. Pick a mode in the strobe group, turn the light off, then go to momentary mode. It should do the last-used strobe. Or, to do a normal (steady) momentary level, turn the light off from a normal ramp mode first instead. Only normal ramp modes and strobes are supported though ā¦ thereās no momentary battcheck, no momentary sunset, and no momentary lockout. What would that even mean? It does do momentary candle though, since itās easier to allow that than not.
Made āholdā auto-reverse in strobe modes.
Made lockout modeās momentary moon use 2 levels instead of 1. The second click goes to the other rampās floor.
Added ten-clicks-from-off as a shortcut to thermal config mode.
Fixed the bug maukka found ā hold-from-off then release-and-hold in stepped ramp wouldnāt work until it had been on for a full second.
Made candle mode slightly more calm but also able to burn a bit brighter sometimes.
Beacon mode duty cycle is 100ms now instead of 500ms.
Made muggle mode do smaller thermal adjustments.
Fixed a minor bug in lightning mode. The brightest flashes should be full power now.
With the new thermal regulation code, hereās what I measured with a fresh 30Q cell:
For comparison, hereās an earlier version measured by Bob_McBob:
It worked, but it had a lot of jitter. So I fixed the jitter (among other things).
These updates apply to all build targets, not just FW3A. I spent the entire day running thermal tests, and every tested light worked pretty well. The only exception so far was a D4S, which was unexpected. It bounced a little before stabilizing. I havenāt been able to test an original D4 yet though.
Yeah, I should have qualified with āWish there was some way for ME to update existing lights.ā I donāt have the necessary hardware and lack the knowledge of the program to deploy it into the EPROM. Iāve flashed custom ROMs on my Android phonesā¦ if I can do that, should I be able to flash Anduril onto my FW3A?
I would āthinkā soā¦ but I am certainly not the person to ask.
I just know it can be done & the hardware/stuff to get going is supposedly pretty cheap.
Aye, the hardware is really cheap from China. Mine took forever to arrive though. I flashed a D4S easily enough thanks to the driver having little acupuncture holes, meaning I didnāt have to desolder anything. I havenāt tried it on a flashlight that Iād have to do surgery on yet, as Iām terrified of bricking it like I did when I tried to perform my first emitter swap.
Short tube D4 works great for that! Absolute most power you can reasonably get on a keychain. I have seen someone attach their keys to the tripod hole on a BLF GT though. Canāt imagine thatās fun to try and fit in your pocket.
Theyāre not much brighter. It was maxing out at ramp level 143/150, and now it goes to 150/150. I doubt anyone will even notice.
About that though, momentary lightning is kind of neat. The way the algorithms work, every time the button is pressed, it triggers a new lightning flash. This wasnāt even strictly on purpose; it happens as a happy side effect of some other code I added months ago. Each button press cancels any pending timers and drops back to the FSM libraryās inner main loop, so it stops whatever itās doing and loops back around to the beginning of the next lightning strike.
TBH, itās kind of a pain. Some lights are easy, like the BLF Q8ā¦ but the FW3A is obnoxious to reflash. It requires unsoldering the LED wires and pulling the driver completely out to get access to the MCU.
Iāve only updated one of mine so far, and that was so I could run some thermal tests. I used the oldest one which still works, in case anything went wrong. I donāt like having a soldering iron inside the ones I actually use, at least if itās not absolutely necessary. It adds wear and tear that Iād prefer to avoid.
I really like newer designs which can be reflashed by pogo pin adapters. Those only take a moment to update.
A few days ago I mentioned that the only improvement for the FW3A that came to my mind would be a less wobbly button. Iād like to add pogo pins to this. Makes flashing so much more beginner friendly, and keeping firmware up to date much less of a pain.
If that optical programming thing could work very reliably, then itād be even easier. Just press the bezel against a monitor and play a video with a load of different white flashes to reprogram, if my understanding of the concept is correct.
The pogo pin adapters, so far, arenāt actually available for purchase. Theyāre more of a build-your-own kind of thing at this point. So they donāt really help much for people who arenāt already pretty invested. But maybe eventually theyāll be easy to get.
Updating the firmware via optical programming would take like six hours, and involves a significant amount of risk. Itās not a very feasible method to do that sort of thing. It could be used to edit config values though. The thing is, itās not much faster than using the buttonā¦ and the server-side details are pretty complicated. There are a lot of different versions of the firmware, running on a lot of different devices, and each one needs its own special configurator.
Mostly, Iām hoping the pogo pin adapters will become easier to get. They work well, and more drivers support this method every month; theyāre just not widely available yet.
Hum, this may be a stupid question but after being baked, if it gets polished, will it turn āpolished baked colourā or will it assume the aluminium below the brown surface?
Nah, I think mineās pretty standard. The button rocks a little if you donāt press it dead centre, which I think feels sloppy compared to the button on something like an Emisar D4. Iād personally far prefer the FW3A to have a consistent, very short travel, quiet click like the D4 rather than the variable amount of clickyness it has now depending on what part of the button you press.
So if I understood that correctly Iām better off trying to source a driver with the new firmware than update the one thatās supposed to be here any day?
I donāt have the necessary hardware and lack the knowledge of the program to deploy it into the EPROM. Iāve flashed custom ROMs on my Android phonesā¦ if I can do that, should I be able to flash Anduril onto my FW3A?
