Project EMERALD log! (SWM F30R mod)

Woohoo, finally got the shipping notice for mine (added stuff holding the shipment up). Should be here Wednesday. Think I’ll go ahead and do a review on mine before I tear it apart.

Got everything fully routed. The daughter board looks like it’s ready to order. The main board has everything connected, but I still don’t like the look of it… may need more work

work of art!

Love the sweeping turns of the traces on the right…beautiful!

Did you make a round polygon pour?

“Ratsnest: nothing to do”. Beautiful, I bet it even passes DRC huh.

I really like all the extra copper pour on the daughter board. I’ve started doing that too, I like the finished look better plus the extra heat sinking it provides.

The trick is to do a big polygon around everything that’s not any particular shape. Then when you have a circular board edge, the pour will automatically isolate from it by whatever distance you set in DRC and it matches the shape exactly

Will it isolate itself inside the milling layer?

Sweet…great to know…thanks a ton tterev3

main board is almost there:

finally done, and ordered!

Have fun putting that together!

Wow nice.

My F30R got here today!

Nice. With a comment from Matt like he did this must be a challenge. To me it would be an impossibility.

checkbook is ready, not sure there is enough in it though :_(

I spent a really long time looking at the ring of LEDs, trying to come up with some way to put TIRs or small reflectors in there and still get heatsinking and still make the light possible to assemble, and I couldn’t come up with anything. So I gave up on having nice beams and made this LED board that will fit right inside the aluminum ring with the 12 holes in it. The ring will provide heatsinking and keep assembly easy, and it has cone shapes machined in that will form very rudimentary reflectors. The beams will be very wide unfortunately, but they shouldn’t be ugly. There are 3 of each of the primary colors (spaced evenly so they won’t be off center) and single emitters for 380nm, 405nm, and 850nm. I used XQ-sized components for all so that they’d fit easily into the existing holes. Colors are XQ-E, UV are Lux UV, and the IR is an Osram SFH 4710 which appears to be almost the same package as the Lux UV

What if I turned a spacer to fill the gap between the bottom of this board and the pill / light engine housing then polished each individual “reflector” or better yet (tho expenses) had it electroplated?

Yeah I thought about something like a spacer for quite some time. In the end it seemed like it was more trouble than it’s worth:
-complicates assembly since you’d have to grease it down to the locking ring
-very tough to get the height just right because the locking ring is threaded in
-XQ parts are designed to heat sink to the top surface of the board
-not really an advantage for optics

Now polishing and/or reshaping the reflectors is probably something to pursue. There’s a pretty large vertical section before the conical section which should be removed. We could do it by milling forward from the back of the ring to move the PCB mounting surface towards the front of the light, but I think the best option would be to keep the depth and reshape the reflectors somehow. I have a weird dremel bit that’s a rounded cone shape that might work for that. Any ideas on drilling in reflector shapes?

Since you’re pretty ok with it not being an ideal beam what if you gave up the idea of individual “reflectors”, its going to be almost impossible to machine 12 of them perfectly even, even with a mill (which I have access to) but what if we cut the separation between the “reflectors” out with a ball mill, something high flute count so the finish came out really smoothly (like a 6 flute) so the “reflector” was a polished U-channel. After cutting it I could tumble polish them.

I’ll also look into EP’ing, I’m just guessing to do our two reflectors is going to be way to much $$, that leaves hand polishing or something I’ve never tried before, chrome powder coat.

What angles do all the emitters project?

Thinking about all the work to an unknown alloy, it might be easier just to turn a new “reflector” with the same idea (it could be done only on a lathe). Same size, same bottom but just turn a U groove into the top Scratch that, then you’d have to drill 12 holes and that’s take the mill anyway. I think the best bet it to either simply try to only polish / coat each of the unmodified cup’s, or to machine then into a single channel and polish that.

edit: What about the possibility of making, or having made a single round ring TIR? I wonder if there is a version if PMMA that would offer decent optical properties that could be 3D printed.

Too bad we can’t get these.

Actually I have a couple of those, but they don’t help here since we need a tiny optic to fit in the ~6mm space between housing and reflector