Ok guys… another quick teardown. As it turns out, there is NO GLUE. What I saw as glue was actually thermal paste between the board and the pill. The white clip can carefully be removed. After doing so, the board comes right off. That entire area that is covered in silkscreen is a big thermal area. So while this isn’t a MCPCB, it has a big thermal path right to the pill and is covered in thermal paste. For 100 lumens, that seems sufficient. LED swaps would be difficult though… perhaps with hot air reflow.
EDIT: looks like the IC is the tried and true PAM2803
The resistor says 043 (underlined). If I understand correctly, that would mean R043 = 0.043 Ohms. But for a PAM2803, that would mean a LED current of 2.2A which certainly isn’t right. If it were a 0.43 Ohm resistor, that would make sense… translating to an LED current of 220 mA.
Thanks for the “deconstruction” gchart! Seems like the original setup is made to “stay as it is” ! And with a nice led, I guess it is not bad at all
Nice light!
Hey gchart, is that the real color Red? Look more like tan/brown to me. The color does not look like Red on their Amazon listing or website.
Anw nice color options though.
Sorry, I messed with my camera settings in my initial images and I’m colorblind so I have no idea how accurate the colors are.
Here’s one I just took. Outdoors (obviously) under a direct noon sun sitting next to some ripe tomatoes. Default image settings on my Pixel 3. How’s this look?
I hope I never lose this one in the grass because I’ll never be able to find it
Cactus vs. red C01 (same anodization as C01R): undecided. The cactus reflected a lot of red light, the red flashlight reflected surprisingly little red light.
Real tiny AAA twisty!
I just ordered one slate blue NW from AE to see how it goes. 8.65 euros shipped looks like a good deal.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Mine comes today from Amazon. Curious if the TIR opening is big enough for a larger LED but I assume it’s the same dimensions as Sofirn one with tiny opening.
Will probably try to reflow whole board with components in place later tonight
Stock Cool White is 102 lumens, just under 6000K CCT and above BBL. Looks mostly white but a slight light blue hue to beam. Not my taste but I didn’t really care cause it was getting removed no matter what.
The anodizing and machining is excellent, definitely the best i’ve seen on an AAA light ever. One thing I dont like is the threads are stiff. It’s very hard to operate one handed. Since it only has one mode maybe it’s OK. It seems like it uses the same TIRs you can find on the Yaji aliexpress store but I didn’t confirm this yet.
Mod time, liberal use of kapton tape just to keep stuff from falling off:
Fail #1: Try to channel heat through brass button. Nothing bad happened but I gave up when the heater was around 215-220. Not sure if heat path wasn’t good or if they used lead free.
Fail #2: (not pictured) try to use soldering iron on brass button from the bottom. Duh, brass button wants to come off instantly, had to re-center it after it slid.
Success: Preheat from the bottom, used the hemostats to keep it in place and keep everything pressed on the brass button and then I used hot air from the top. I dont think I ruined the LED but it definitely took more heat than I expected.
I ended up slicing a LH351*C* 4000K 90 CRI. Since it was sliced it already had some 60/40 solder on it and I put a liberal amount of flux paste between the old Skilhunt solder and my 60/40 tinned and sliced LED. It went on much easier. I’m not certain the original solder on the pad fully melted but at the very least it’s flowed on top of their solder if not completely re-flowed. Oh well it’s <250 mA and I’ll redo it if it fails.
Now it’s >90 CRI and 63.5lm - bigger drop in output than I thought but it makes sense going to NW+sliced+high CRI