Hi BLF,
As many of you may know, I've built a variety of different drivers, all fairly complicated and over-driven, compared to regular, sensible drivers .
I thought perhaps it may be time to build one that's a little more sensible and accessible to everyone, well designed, and have some extra features over stock drivers.
Currently the idea is to create a open-source, efficient BLF buck-boost or switching driver.
The candidate target is the FW3x or 17/20mm form factor, and the goal is to design the driver so that it uses open sourced firmware like Anduril or similar, and be designed to be easy to assemble by hobbyists. This way all firmware for the driver will be based on existing designs, though this means it may not be able to support other outlandish features from my other flashlights. However, considering that the FW3A is a FET+7+1 driver, it looks like freeing up 2 pins will allow additional improvements, such as better auxiliary front lighting control, better thermal control, or something else. I'll however leave the firmware to folks who know better such as TK and the rest of the community.
I'm sure everyone here has a much better idea of what features would make a good driver, so I'm asking if anyone would like to contribute to a 'dream-list'. Obviously not all requests will work together, but I hope to be able to collate a nice feature set, and then design a nice driver from the distilled results.
Here are some preliminary ideas to kick things off (will be updated as we go along)...
- High Efficiency Synchronous Switching Topology
- Boost mode operation (e.g. with FET, with my caveat that I'm not a fan of unregulated FET drive!)
- Minimal of 1S operation
- 3-5A constant current regulated output, no PWM
- Ultra-low firefly mode
- Open-source BLF firmware
- PogoProg programmable from bottom of driver
- Designed to be as easy to assemble at home as possible
Finally, I understand that there may be variants of this driver, for example, if designed specifically for FW3x, then it will likely have slightly different feature set than say a 17mm driver for Convoy flashlights.
Or perhaps a driver like this exists already and I don't know about it.
Cheers everyone.