I’ve recieved my driver 2 days ago and after some playing with it, I want to write something about it.
First issue I encountered was when I tried to solder rgb wires to driver. I ripped one of the solder pads from the board
They are so incredibly delicate, I have some expirience with soldering and never encountered pads so sensitive. Since i never really liked aux led boards, it isn’t that big of a deal for me.
Second issue is extremely strong flickering in lower end of the ramp. It flickers like it’s in candle mode up until I hit ramp level 35-40, which is too bright for a ramp floor. So after puting in this driver, I definetly won’t use my FW3A in “middle of the night toilet run”, unless i want flicker.
Other than that driver works well, especialy the thermal stepdown from top of ramp, which is much better than in factory driver. It doesn’t overshoot or step down too fast like it did with factory driver. There is also obvious improvement in battery life. Overall runtime is about the same, but it is fully stabilized now until deplating battery when cooled. I also feel like pwm of fet channel would be better than just on/off. Fet being just on/off causes turbo step down before flashlight body gets appropriately warm.
Overall it’s good driver but needs improvements, especially in low brightness flicker.
Sorry for all grammar mistakes that I unknowingly made.
I think i found the source of flickering issue. I decided to take out the driver and clean it with both acetone and IPA.
After cleaning, flickering is still there, but nowhere near as bad as it was. Now it completely stops flickering at 15+ ramp level (it was 35-40 previously). I wonder why it was dirty straight from the mail (I didn’t use flux for soldering) and which component is so sensitive to dirt.
Tailcap contacts seem to be fine. In my frustration to fix flickering, I already cleaned them and also checked if original driver would work and indeed it was working flawlessly.
I have 2 of these drivers installed in fw3x lights. Both have a very slight flicker at the lowest setting, but it’s unnoticeable unless I look very close at the light on my white table top.
[Quote]Lowest moon mode is not as low as other 7135 systems - at the moment, it is a little brighter, but still usable. In fact, it is possible to reduce this even further, but the buck-boost goes into a pulse frequency modulated mode to save power / efficiency, and a flicker of about 100+Hz is visible. In fact, at lowest moon mode, a very slight ‘pwm’ of around 1kHz is present. This can all be removed, at the cost of decreased efficiency at low modes, so I think the trade-off is OK. Any higher and output quickly smooths out.
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maybe I need training… 