I’ve spent a lot of time this and last year thinking about small zoomies. And ordering small zoomies.
A couple of days ago I’ve had a concept that I tried to visualize by making a sketch.
It turned out better than I thought it would and so I decided to share it with you.
Drawing note: I use different shades of grey to denote different parts rather than different material.
So…what it is?
An almost-unambitious 14500 zoomie.
What do I mean by that?
Typical zoomies have many drawbacks. Among them:
- poor efficiency in throw mode
- lack of waterproofing
- mediocre cooling
- many moving parts which is a reliability challenge
Here I didn’t try to challenge any of these, I just wanted to draw a zoomie that’s first and foremost simple.
Then I deviated from this path a bit…but in a reversible way.
So this light is not very simple but not very complex either. And it is easy to modify to make it very simple again.
Looking at the picture from the business end you can see a pretty thick lens. It’s Optolife A295MC, AR coated aspheric from a good but inexpensive lens maker.
The LED is Luminus SST-20. Good high CRI emitter that offers fair throw and output. It could be substituted for Luxeon MZ for pure flooder or Boost HL for a pure thrower.
11 mm MCPCB sits on a copper pill-head. I call it pill-head because it’s threaded and hidden like a pill when the light is in flood mode, but exposed in throw mode.
11 mm driver is a simple FET-based e-switch. SST-20 or Boost HL are not good with 18650 and FET but should handle 14500 very well, being driven fairly hard but not too hard.
The driver uses Cell-side switching, implemented simpler than tterev3 did - the switch is simply soldered on the driver board.
Going back to the head…there are small yellow squares to the sides of the main LED. These are RGB aux LEDs. The plastic tension ring that holds the MCPCB against the pill is not a typical white or black piece but just a heavily frosted diffuser.
The tail…is not very remarkable, just a cell-pusher cylinder. This tail doesn’t have a space for a lanyard hole. A surefire-style ring would be used instead.
Size? My drawings are not precise enough to tell for sure. It’s not going to be the smallest 14500 light out there but it would clearly be on the smaller side of things.
At the same time it would be sized similarly to typical AAA zoomies, much smaller than any AA zoomie on the market.
I spoke about potential complexity removal…
One could ditch the aux LEDs to make it a little simpler.
Or even ditch the e-switch and put a regular clicky at the tail. Then this zoomie wouln’t come with any novelty of its own, just yet-another 14500 light. But still quite a bit smaller than anything else in its class.
After drawing this I went back to my 2019 dream thread.
I am surprised that the dream has changed so little.