Hello all,
Just a quick progress update. I'm happy to say that we have first light with the lume1 driver.
For the flashlight, I used a FW3C bead-blasted host previously purchased from Nealsgadgets. The stock 1+7+FET driver was removed from the flashlight. This is quite easy, but does require desoldering wires from the LED MCPCB first. After that, it's a simple procedure with no glue involved.
The lume1 driver was then dropped into place and installed. As a quick note, the FW3 flashlight has a small screw hole drilled through the MCPCB shelf, which acts as a locating pin for the LED MCPCB to prevent it from rotating when the top cover is screwed on. This screw hole had a few sharp edges on the driver side, which I deburred away.
I think this PCB colourway works quite well with the FW3C. The lume1 driver fits! No issues with the inductor hitting the driver cavity, as designed. Programming was done using a HQ pogopin which I put together myself, and an AVRISP2. You can obviously use whatever programmer you want.
The original emitters were SST-20 4000K 90CRI. They seem to be quite popular, but I never really liked the tint of the SST20s, since they are very green especially at the lower power levels, and never really getting better unless driven at Turbo.
I thought this would be a good opportunity to use some of the fairly rare but extremely nice Nichia 219B 9080 4500K 'rose tint' LEDs I had in the past. These were reflowed onto the original MCPCB. The thermal paste was cleaned up and replaced with Arctic Silver 5. Finally, a TurboGlow glow gasket was added between the optic and the LEDs, just for fun.
Fun Question - if you had to build your own flashlight with this driver, which LED would you choose and why?
But does it work?
I'm happy to say that it does!
Anduril Firmware
With the support from ToyKeeper, I was able to get Anduril working on this flashlight. Fortunately ToyKeeper had already done a massive amount of work with Anduril and it had all sorts of capabilities built in to allow easy support of this driver. Since I work on a Windows machine, I used Atmel Studio for the firmware builds and flashing - I had a few requests about this surprisingly, so I thought it would be better to get something going with Atmel Studio, since most people don't have a unix environment.
There's still a little bit of work left to do for me to evaluate all functionalities of Anduril, but all the basics are working, including:
- Ramping functionality (in this case, 1024 levels of brightness with 10-bit PWM, similar to Noctigon K1), all regulated with Buck Boost up to 3A
- Turbo with FET
- RGB aux LEDs verified working (on my dev board; the FW3x does not have a LED aux board for it, yet!)
- Standard strobe modes all working (candlelight, bicycle, party, tactical, and thunderstorm)
- Utility functions working (e.g. voltage reading, lockout modes, aux LED control etc)
- [Update: External temperature sensor is now working and much more accurate, likely no user calibration required]
There are still some functions on the lume1 board not taken advantage of yet including:
- 4 solder jumper pads are connected to MCU but no firmware written to take advantage of them yet
Once most of the bugs are sorted out, the firmware will be posted up on TK's repository.
Finally, I took a quick video to illustrate some of the basic functionalities so far:
Please keep in mind that this is a video of preliminary hardware and firmware, and work on it is still in progress.
Regardless, this one is shaping up to be my new go-to flashlight already. It's not as bright as my GXB drivers but I think it's a lot more useful! I'm even thinking of swapping the battery out for a Samsung 35E for longer runtimes since the point of this driver is to be more efficienct. I'm also glad to say that there isn't any issue with noise from the switching regulator at all power levels. And finally, it's not obvious in the video but the Nichia 219B tint is absolutely beautiful, redder than blackbody!
Hopefully this will be a driver which people will find useful. Feedback, comments and suggestions much welcomed.
Thanks for reading.