wide-spectrum Blackshadow Terminator mod

Very good write up. Detailed and with good pictures.

"All four tints individually look pretty terrible compared to their combined output."

Its nice to see others opening their eyes up for different types of tint mixing. :)

Do you notice any difference on the ground before you if you hold the light upside down? I wonder if the spill edge looks better then.

Thanks for not assuming knowledge in this post! I learned a lot.

Thanks, fellow dvorak typist! The reason I included so much detail and basic information was to help others who haven’t really done much modding yet. For our experienced members, a single sentence would be enough to explain everything I did… but people who haven’t already done it (like me) might not know what to do.

I’ve been reading BLF a lot for a couple years and had all sorts of mods I wanted to try, but it took me forever to get started. Eventually though, I found some youtube tutorials on soldering, bought some parts and tools, and started improving my lights. I hope I can encourage others to do the same.

Another well done pictorial .

Thanks for sharing .

Spill edge? With DC-Fix?

There is no edge… the beam is like 175 degrees wide, and tapers smoothly from the center all the way to the edge. Anything which is at least 30cm or 40cm from the light gets smooth white light. Closer than that though, and I get some rainbows.

This is how it looks when it’s resting directly on a flat surface:

If I’m holding it in my hand, the tints have already fully merged by the time they reach the ground. There are no weird colors at the edges of the spill. Even just a short distance from the ground, the beam is reasonably consistent… These show the light resting on top of a tissue box:

Now that I look a bit closer, it seems like the tints blend quickly at the center and the edge, but it takes a bit longer to blend at around 45 degrees. I hadn’t noticed until just now.

It’s funny you mention that. I have an old nearly-full bottle of flux that I’ve been trying to open. A pipe wrench on the lid (wrapped with leather) isn’t enough to open it, so I’m hoping a hot water soak might do the trick.

Or I may just go buy a new bottle.

Sweet.

Looks like they blend nicely!

That’s the question, isn’t it? Will in blend? :slight_smile:

In a battle of Blackshadow Terminator versus Blendtec blender, I bet the blender would lose.

Could you show us how it illuminates some things most any of us might see when using a flashlight? Outdoors at night of a flower bed, a flag, a row of cars, something that will show natural colors?

I love how a de-domed greenish tint emitter makes green grass and trees look, but hate what it does to natural base greys like stone or concrete, colors in flowers and the like. Even the browns of bark get messed up by a green tint. I’ve really been trying hard to get a pure white light, not easy. I do like the MT-G2, although it’s warmer than I really like. But that big emitter is so creamy smooth I can’t help but like it.

This blend of colors seems to do the trick, how did you go about selecting the spread? I don’t ever look at the warm tints so wouldn’t begin to guess what might give a good spread…or did you just go by the numbers? 1,3,5,7 A, B, C ,D? lol Looks like you got it right, however you did it.

I’ll see what I can do about more natural shots, but there aren’t many flowers around after the hail storms the past couple days.

I didn’t do careful calculations about the tint. I just looked at the Cree tint chart and tried to pick several points with approximately equal spacing and a wide overall spread. Then I threw that out the window and bought whatever was easy to get without waiting a month for shipping.

Originally, I was hoping for 6500K, 4500K, and 2700K. So, 1/4/8 tints. But with four emitters I adjusted that to 6500K, 5000K, 4000K, and 3000K. Ish. 1/3/5/7. And ideally all would be fairly close to the ideal black body tint, the dotted line going through the center of the chart. It would probably be better with the two middle tints farther apart though, and an 8-ish tint on the warm end instead of 7-ish.

What I got came out closer to 6700K, 4900K, 4200K, and 3100K. But that’s close enough for a proof of concept.

With the MT-G2 and “EZ-White”, Cree did the same thing… but a lot smaller, a lot more precise, more carefully selected, and they seem to have chosen tints much closer to each other. Like, I think they use a combination more like 3A+3B+3C+3D, or maybe 2T+4S+2U+4R. Something like that. Regardless, I hear it’s beautiful.

If my obsession with the big emitter ends up with me cramming 4 into my BST, I’ll show ya. :slight_smile:

You need to lay off the bottle!

Seriously tho flux paste/brush-on liquids are the old way, my two preferred methods are either a no-clean flux pen ($7 @ your local RS) or a syringe dispenser of no-clean gel (yet to find a local source).

Or you can just switch to using solder paste for everything, the only time I even use solder anymore is for when I need a large amounts of it, need to braid a spring or connecting wires/drivers directly to pills. Other than that I tin all my pads, tin stripped wire, even solder on springs with solder paste these days.

I went to Radio Shack. They had no flux. They called the other store in town, who also had no flux. But they both had an entire wall full of phone cases and styluses!

Next time I can get out during business hours, I have a local place to check. That’s actually where I tried to go earlier, but I got there 15 minutes after they closed. I was kinda hoping for a flux pen, actually. And some solder paste so I can put together some copper discs for a heat sink for my next mod. I may even try to assemble a custom driver, if I can’t flash the stock one.

Very cool concept and build.

This is the exact flux pen my local RS carries, if you have prime it should be about the same price as buying local.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004X4KOWS/ref=aw_wl_ov_dp_1_2?colid=NRT0RIM3WLR8&coliid=I4QCQSOGH0RVS

for flux paste I use this from eBay, came in 3 days from a wearhouse in NJ. I went to a few places looking for it local before ordering (there are actually several different large electronics stores in the area, none carried solder paste and only one employee knew exactly what it was).

http://m.ebay.com/itm/360822303282?txnId=518180719023

Added diffuser film sizing to the OP. I’m glad I have a bunch of random world currency to use as cutting stencils.

So, my original idea a while back was to ask RMM to do a S3-triple with three different tints, to get a wide-spectrum light the size of a cigar. And it’s almost time for him to open up his modding service again.

Looking through his current stock, here’s what looks like the best option:

XP-G2 R5 1A, ~6700K, 518+ lm at 1.5A
XP-G2 R4 5A1, ~4100K, 485+ lm at 1.5A
XP-G2 Q2 7C4 90+CRI, ~2900K, 288+ lm at 1.5A

This should provide the widest and most evenly-spread tint selection from what is available right now, and should result in a blended overall tint of just under 4900K.

That tint estimate was calculated by averaging the three tints multiplied by their relative output values/bins. ((6700 * 100) + (4100 * 93) + (2900 * 55)) / 248 == 4882 Kelvin

Using the same type of calculation on the BST-wide, I get about 4843 K:
(6700 + (4900*0.93) + (4200*0.80) + (3100*0.80)) / 3.53 == 4843 K

I’m not sure which Carclo lens would work best. The 10507 is described as “narrow spot beam that is very smooth all the way through with no discernable hotspot”, 10508 is “very floody”, and 10509 is “extremely floody”. I assume one of the three would be best, but it’s hard to say which.

As for power level, I’m guessing 4.4A total would be ideal, since that drives each emitter at nearly 1.5A, so it should make the tints as close as possible to the manufacturer’s specs. Also, it’s a nice balance between lumens and heat, and I think it would do about 1100lm OTF on turbo if the optics lose 12% of the output. (518lm + 485lm + 288lm) * 4.4A/(3*1.5A) * 0.88 == 1110 lm

WOW! Awesome build…very cool!

Very nice. That is something I’ve been considering with my EYE40. It comes on one emitter at a time progressively until all four are active. It would be nice to start with a single HiCRI coming on first and then moving into cooler tints until I reach U2 1A on the fourth emitter.

Nice work Toykeeper! :wink: