At present I don’t plan to. Physical mods I can handle, as I have the equipment in my shop for that (lathe and small milling machine), but I haven’t gotten into electrical mods and precision soldering .
I would love to up the output slightly, since this seems to be a worthy platform. Maybe I can find someone with electrical skills who wants to play with an M6 :bigsmile: .
Mehhhhhh…. Full cycle to shut the light off is a MAJOR buzz kill for me… I always always always hate it. Dont even touch the costco light because of it.
Why would anybody want to have to click the button 5 times to get to off….Stupid |(
I didn’t want to get too far off topic here, so I started a thread in the OFF Topic Chatter forum titled A Few Machining Projects . https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/20491
Are these proper seconds or just counting ‘one, two, three’ in your head?
It seems like 3 full timed seconds would be a long time, but I often read descriptions that say ‘hold for 2 or 3 seconds to turn on/off’ or switch to strobe or something, and in reality it’s more like 800ms or 1 second.
I ordered two. They came in today, un-announced. USPS still says they are in some California sort facility. The box looks like it was sat upon by a herd of overweight elephants pregnant with quadruplets. Lights survived the elephant attack intact.
ALL modes, including high, show 615 Hz PWM.
Parasitic drain is minimal (< 3 microamps).
Here is a plot of a run:
After around 9 minutes the light was at 1800 lumens. It then stairstepped down in intensity over a couple of minutes to around 1300 lumens. It was at 52 degrees C. I don’t know if the rampdown was due to temperature, time, or voltage (I suspect that it was time).
At around 90 minutes the intensity started dropping as the battery voltage started dropping below the regulation point. The light was at 70 degrees C (toasty!).
After 2 hours the light level started dropping off the cliff. It stopped dropping at around 24 lumens. There was apparently no low-voltage cutoff. The cells were at 2.7 volts and only one LED was lit and it was flickering. The light stopped responding to button presses and would not shut off.
I put one of my custom SRK drivers configured for 9 amps into it. Output went to 2200 lumens (from 1900 lumens). I put the M6 driver retaining ring into the light and mounted the driver onto the top of the ring (actually it is just sitting loose on it now). It needs to be tacked down with a small spot of weak adhesive.
The stock M6 is driving the LEDs at around 2.5A each, which isn’t too bad. Some U3 LEDs or high bin XML2’s might it get up to 2800 lumens or so.
On my SRK with XML2/T6/3C LEDs my low mode is around 50 lumens. The M6 with the same driver is around 10 lumens.