Hey David, good to see ya! Been a while, hope all is wellā¦
Yep WarHawk, just a big ol wall of light with no artifacts or nothin. The MT-G2 in my chopped AA minimag is pretty cool, doesnāt throw of course but man itāll light up a room and looking for something in a confined space itās really cool, you donāt have to point it.
WarHawk, hereās the build thread on the Texas Poker, done by Photon Fanatic almost a year ago now. Iāve been wearing it around my neck on a Ti curb chain the entire year. Started out with a mini fluPIC driver at around 650mA, switched it to the MattAus PICcolo at 800mA then found one that would do 1A. Now itās running at a limited 1.42A for the Nichia 219B thatās in it. Really liking how it functions, 3 1/2 lumens in low is nice, and it comes on so neat and smooth. Perfect!
In the last year, since I had this Ti light made, Iāve managed to build some pretty neat lights. Iāve got a few favorites, with the M8 up at the top of the list. But this little TP is special. Whole different category of course, so to finally be getting itās output up in modern times, well, itās nice.
With a big handful of BLF members directly influencing the making of this light and itās componentsā¦Comfy, Rufusbduck, MattAus, PhotonFanatic, RMM, JonnyC, thereās been a lot of help from a lot of really great folks here and I Greatly Appreciate It!
This drivers pcb is thinner by almost half than the prototype PICcolo driver. So it sits inside the copper pill which worked out really nice, allowing me to solder the ground ring to the wall of the pill pretty easily. I used Rufusbducks sandwiching idea to pot the top side of the board with Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive and placed a disc of copper for the battery positive contact right on top of the small FET, pressing the AATA to a thin layer between them. With the power lead coming through the board, I simply stripped the insulation, twisted the wire, wrapped it around the copper disc and soldered it in place. Then sanded most of the solder off so the battery has as direct contact to the copper as possible. The AATA was white and shiny, til the flux made it ugly. Oh well. Not like itās seen other than here.
As you can see, in spite of Comfyās efforts to make the Convoy S6 ultra small, the Texas Poker is tiny beside it. Sure do like seeing those .5mm threads all over the place! Especially in copperā¦. ahhhh :bigsmile:
LOL ;) I didn't try to make the S6 ultra small, I just tried to get rid of the wasted space in the existing design. It's practically a baseball bat compared to others...
I was making reference to the fact that the S6 I showed the TP next to wasnāt stock. Probably should have put a stock one next to it, or showed it next to the S2200. lol
I couldāve shown it next to a mini C8 and made it look bigā¦ itās about the same size as the mini C8 and without looking close it would have looked full size.
Dbcstm, you can clean it up with rubbing alcohol and a toothbrush. B-12 works faster but is much more toxic. Neither seems to affect the solder mask or silkscreen.
I just built the second BLF Tiny10 FET. :bigsmile: Itās running 3.48A to an XM-L2 T6 3C. Iām either going to hook it up to a de-domed XP-G2 R5 1A or a domed XP-G2 R5 3C. Whatdya think?
The little 3ā Texas Poker is now doing 552 Out the Front lumens at start up, 452 at 30 seconds. Pulling ~3.02A from an Efest IMR10440. De-domed XP-G2 R5 1A.
BLF Tiny10 FET with 22 ga Silicone wires. No limits in the firmware.
Nice! I did get access to some lab power supplies so I have been playing around with XM-Ls at sub-zero temperatures (peltier plates and dry ice); it got brighter all the way up to 9 amps. Someday Iām gonna get set up to measure lumens and redo that experiment and see how many lumens I can hit with an XM-L.
No problem, if they work without them the gate resistor can just use a jumper.
Is it possible the longer trace on the SRK board is why those don't need the resistors? I really can't come up with anything that makes sense to explain it. :~
I donāt know about dissolving fiberglass since itās resin and fiber but you can sand it thinner. The more common way of doing it so far has been to drill or machine out the center pad and replace it with copper.
Iām amazed at how close the components can be on the driver and not have issues. Some are difficult to see if theyāre not touching, theyāre that close. And yet some pretty major amperage runs through the circuits and all is well, and with these little bitty drivers the traces just canāt be all that bigā¦is 22ga wire from the driver to the emitter overkill? I had to stuff the wires into the TP pill, even had to pull em through with my curved jaw hemostats, they just do fit, like everything else on this driver.