BLF LT1 Lantern (4x18650): Good but...

It should not increase the price buy much. The hardware is cheap. I’m sure Narsil/Anduril could accomodate the input through bluetooth and a app. What you need to develop is a app which could cost some money. But you would use the app as base for an entire ecosystem of lights that support bluetooth thereby spreading the development costs to many units of different lights.

Hardware cost + programming integration. I don’t know about that…. i remember seeing ’ Our workers have better things to do’ in response to making extremely basic code changes in Arduil.
They stated they just plop the software on and don’t touch it. Don’t see it happening :slight_smile:

If you want to drive some innovation why dont you hack a bluetoth le board into your lt1 and write an app for it? Im certian, the laziest way would be to patch the bluetooth board into the switch conmection. At that point all it costs is your time, and a couple dollars for the bluetooth moduals. Tbh, i may end up doing that with a 433mhz tranciever.

A simple I2C Bluetooth board might be an easy solution. Some rewrite of the firmware to handle commands via the Bluetooth stack. Might not have the same power efficiency as an optimized integrated circuit.

Another interesting idea would be to use a ZigBee interface.

This was DBSAR reply at the time (11/05/2017):

I lack time and skill for that. I look at all the cheap bluetooth toys on the market and reason it must be possible to build a light that offers something like that.

If there’s anything I’d want to see on the LT1, it would be an old-school lantern-style rotary knob for on/off and brightness. That takes 0 knowledge of any UI to operate. Also an available 8X 18650 base would be cool. (Wider, not taller somehow.)

7:45 , not sure why people say things like this. I don’t think its hard to remember number of clicks to do things after the first couple times. Don’t need to know what blinkies / strobes are either. you see what they are - 2 clicks cycle through ….find what you want.

I think its funny we have advanced so far with tech that now we need to design things so simple a ape that was alive 1 million years ago could be transported to present day and learn how to use it.
‘I could hand this to an amoeba and they will easily use it’ :smiley:

I see your point. The ease of use (once you get used to it) given the complexity of Anduril is great—I love it. However, sometimes the simple things in life are nice too. I enjoy being able to hand a flashlight to someone without having to explain how it works. I have to remind myself that most people are not flashlight enthusiasts. Also a rotary knob allows you to control the speed of the ramp based on how fast you turn it. I wonder how feasible it would be to have a rotary knob that can also depress in (ie click) for all other Anduril functions.

Could it be possible to make the LT1 better with Bluetooth control? Almost certainly, if it is well-implemented.

Is it really a shortcoming of the LT1 that it doesn’t feature Bluetooth control? I don’t think that is a reasonable criticism. If any Bluetooth light exists, I haven’t seen it yet.

Actually, I bet there’s more than one Bluetooth controlled light out there, somewhere, but if they don’t get the lighting features right, they will be inferior products. Most LT1 buyers are enthusiastic about it because it first and foremost gets the lighting features right. DBSAR invested a significant amount of time and effort testing and modifying a very wide variety of lanterns to determine what works well and what doesn’t to make sure it serves it’s primary purpose. The tint-shifting and highly advanced yet simple-to-use firmware add to its appeal.

Is it a dead-end? Absolutely not. The firmware is open source, and if the driver is not open source (I don’t recall), it at least is derived from designs fairly well-known in the flashlight community. Several individuals put a significant amount of their time, as far as I know with little or no pay, to give the LT1 its existing features. It’s absolutely an option for others to do the same to increase the feature-set of the LT1, such as by figuring out a way to integrate Bluetooth with the existing driver (maybe it could be as simple as piggy backing on the button input pin), or creating a new driver intended to work with a Bluetooth chip.

I’m glad you like the light overall, but it’s not fair to call it a dead-end on the basis that it doesn’t have a feature no other similar light has, on the assumption that it is simple to add. Even the features it has are not simple to create. Anduril has had a fairly long evolution of continuous improvement by Toykeeper, incorporating a lot of feedback from those of us who use it.

I want to end by emphasizing something you observed in your video: the basic functions of turning it on, or off, or changing the brightness are very easy to use. That’s what I think makes Anduril such a good user interface. It has a lot of other handy or novel features, but even though those are more complex to access, their inclusion does not make it hard to learn the main features.

It should not be complex, but it would take some skill, and you’d want to make sure it is robust, and it might be more difficult to keep waterproof.

I’m pretty sure a potentiometer could be used to provide a varying voltage to one of the microcontroller pins that a modified version of the firmware could use to determine what the output should be. If I understand right, the Jetbeam RRT-01 rotary flashlight using a hall effect sensor rather than a potentiometer, so that’s another possible method.

It’s not a flashlight, but the popular Viltrox photography lights have something similar - a knob controls the brightness, or if you press the knob in, that triggers a button that switches the knob to controlling color temperature.

@iamlucky13

I meant no disrespect when I talk about a dead end. It is the observation that a large bulk of excellent functionality is squeezed through a UI based on a single button. It is done in the most clever way but still represents a dead end as from here on out you need a new interface to really improve the lantern. Wether you ad on a rotary switch, more buttons or a bluetooth function is not so important, but it all would represent a more drastic change in design.

A rotary pot switch would be mechanical, right? They tend to get ‘dirty’ and not work well over time unless maintained with a good cleaner.

DO NOT WANT. Honestly. I plan on my LT1 being used for at least a decade.

Who is going to fund software development over that period of time? How many “smart” devices out there today are sitting in the bin because the software wasn’t updated / isn’t compatible with newer operating systems? Not to mention how buggy many smartphone apps are these days.

Chances are, if I’m using my LT1, there’s no power for miles. Burning up electrons to avoid getting out of the chair doesn’t sound appealing to me.

If you want that sort of stuff, go take a look at Mr Beams Netbeams thingy.

Great review. I guess you used a drone?

Thank you, yes I used a drone. So I operated the drone and the lantern at the same time. This shows that the basic UI of the lantern is very good. My complaint is that the UI blocks the lantern from unleashing its full potential.

Maybe you’d like to give gramma a lantern. Maybe to keep on its lowest setting as a nightlight, crank it up slightly to be able to walk to the can without turning on all the lights along the way.

I can picture gramma being overwhelmed by having to control-alt-doubleclick’n’hold just to adjust the brightness.

“Oh, c’mon, gramma! Even an ape could use it! So who’s smarter, you or the ape?”

“Uhh, how big of an ape?”

I can imagine and imagine it unecessary.

Maybe. But If you look into the BLF LT1 half of the functions are not really necessary. And half of the functions are on top of it basically out of reach unless you have patience and the manual at hand. You have all that potential that is already there in a high tech fully electronic light that runs a software but the interface is just not there. It is like having a big engine but a weak transmission and flat tires.