AstroLux A01 AAA Nichia 219B Review - Winner winner, chicken dinner. An excellent, Neutral tint High CRI LED keychain light!

Here’s a runtime test on high with an Eneloop. Battery voltage was under 1 volts in the end. Fan was used to cool the light.

Maximum temp was 33°C @ 10-20 minutes. After that it dropped gradually.

Appreciated information, maukka.
What was the ambient temperature during measurement?
Seems to operate pretty cool, good news for those of us who live in places of 40+° summers… 8)

Cheers

Ambient temp was 25°C. I will do another test without a fan later.

Waiting on the GB :wink:

Not only is the efficiency terrible on most, there seem to be no programmable ones! There was a thread here on developing a programmable boost driver, and attempting to improve efficiency, but no idea how far that has gotten…

Woah, gimme AN HANDFUL of those lights!! Brilliant upgrades! Thanks for the review, this really came as a nice surprise.

And for those looking for a (deep carry) clip:

!http://img.banggood.com/images/2014/chenjincheng/07/SKU257160/SKU257160(1).jpg!

(also available at BG for very little money)

Nice flat regulation there for a AAA cell.
Thank you for doing the test for us.

Can’t see the clip image posted?

As if I would care… :ghost:
Pretty sure you can find whatever kind of clip he intended to show us for WAY LESS than half the price off eBay. :expressionless:
Sure, Banggood may have some nice deals but… that’s about all. Their webshite’s search engine is such a disgusting pile of horseshite it makes me want to fix whoever are to blame’s retarded brains WITH MY AXE! And that’s just only one of many jackassly designed/implemented/maintained “features” of their webshite. From time to time, their “can’t see what’s wrong with what you say” attitude and lies mocks me to no end. What a handful of advertisement overspending donkeyass douchebags! (I have to resort to think of them sometimes…)
Don’t get me wrong, nothing against them, really. 0:)

Cheers

Interesting, did another runtime measurement with a second A01. This time without a fan. This one runs a bit longer with the same battery and of course got a whole lot hotter. Maximum temp was 54°C @ 25-30 minutes in 26°C ambient. Not comfortable to hold with bare hands.

edit: updated the graph after measuring lux on both of the lights after 5 minutes. The output is the same +–2%. For some reason the Grey one runs more efficiently or the fan is actually detrimental in this case. I will have to measure the purple one again without a fan.

edit2: Note to self: do not measure runtimes with batteries that have less than 5 cycles on them. The runtime with the Eneloop Pro AAA has significantly increased on both lights after couple of more charge-discharge cycles :slight_smile:

Nice. Let me point out a couple of things:

  1. LED’s light output performance (usually) is inversely proportionate to its temperature. According to the usual Relative Luminous Flux VS Junction Temperature graphs which can be found on most Cree led documents, these about 20º of ∆T may mean a reduction of 5% in light output for the… so what the hell is going on with that silver/grey unit? Nothing really I think, because…
  2. To my knowledge, battery internal resistance is also inversely proportionate to temperature, and that may be having a much deeper impact on overall performance since the driver could be operating in a noticeably more efficient way due to the increased input voltage.
  3. Am I speaking bullshit? Where the fuck is my :beer: beerp!? ROFL!

Cheers

Yeah, it had nothing to do with the fan. I measured the purple one without a fan and its runtime to 10 % was ~50 minutes. Pay no attention to those earlier measurements, it was just the batteries running in :slight_smile:

I got my A01 a couple days ago and I’ve been playing with it since. I don’t have a camera for taking beamshots, and I don’t have equipment for measuring light output, so all I can do is dump my thoughts and comparisons. (Pardon the text spacing. It was the best I could figure out.)

  • I haven’t found any official specs for the A01, but it’s supposed to be identical to the Manker E01, which claims a firefly/low/high of 0.14/7/102 lumens. My main question with the A01 was whether or not the low mode really is 7 lumens. I did an eyeball compared it to several other flashlights using similar low modes in my collection just to see. Here’s the list:
Lumens Flashlight
? AstroLux A01 Nichia 219B, 90 CRI
7 EagleTac D25A Clicky Nichia 219 D220, 92 CRI
12 Thrunite Ti3 Neutral White
16 Lumintop Tool Copper Reylight Nichia 219B, 91 CRI, 4500K
20 Olight i3S (cool white)
29 Rayus C01 Nichia 219, 83 CRI, 5000k
32 Lumintop Tool Aluminum (cool white)

For brightness testing, I aimed the flashlights at the walls and my apartment door and judged with my eyeballs. An eyeball test is somewhat difficult to judge lumens, because a flashlight with a smaller hotspot will appear brighter than a flashlight with a larger hotspot at the same lumens. For example, the EagleTac D25A appears to be slightly brighter than the A01, but the A01 has a wider hotspot, though both are rated at 7 lumens. To work around this, I used a variety of distances from 6 inches to 15 feet.

After conducting the brightness tests, I would conclude that my A01 is slightly brighter than the EagleTac D25A and slightly dimmer than the Thrunite Ti3, so maybe 9 or 10 lumens, which is pretty close to the Manker E01 specs.

  • Functionally speaking, the flashlight that closely compares to the AstroLux A01 is the Thrunite Ti3 Neutral White. Both have similar lumens spacing, and both have the mode order of Moonlight -> Low -> High -> Moonlight -> Low -> High -> Strobe.
Mode Spacing Flashlight
0.04/12/120 Thrunite Ti3 Neutral White
0.14/ 7/102 AstroLux A01 Nichia 219B, 90 CRI

Visually speaking, the A01’s moonlight does appear slightly brighter than the Ti3, the low and high modes are slightly less bright than the Ti3. These differences match the lumen claims of the Manker E01.

One difference is that the Ti3 has “short term memory”. If the light is turned off and back on between 2 and 10 seconds, the last mode is used. After 10 seconds, the light resets back to moonlight mode. The Manker E01 specs claim to have short term memory, but I didn’t see any evidence of short term memory on the AstroLux A01.

  • The strobe mode is ALWAYS the 7th mode in the mode cycle, regardless of how long you take to get there. For example: Moonlight -> Low -> High -> Moonlight -> Low -> High -> leave light on for 10 minutes -> Strobe. The Thrunite Ti3 has the same behavior, but the Olight i3S requires you to get to the 7th mode within a few seconds to activate strobe.
  • The first few times I tested the A01’s high mode, I noticed some flickering, as though the battery was somehow struggling to maintain the light on high. I later solved this problem by making sure the head was FULLY TIGHT. This eliminated the flickering and made the high mode even brighter than my initial high mode tests. I’m not sure if this problem is specific to my light or if it’s a design flaw.
  • The body has a flat top side and a flat bottom side. This makes the A01 slightly more roll resistant than the Thrunite Ti3 and Olight i3S in my tests. It’s not a roll stopper - once it starts rolling, it will roll. But it requires just a bit more force to start it rolling.
  • I can’t decide if the A01’s flat top and bottom body design is better, worse, or simply different than the Thrunite Ti3’s body, which is a round tube with crosshatch knurling.

On the one hand, the Ti3’s knurling means that my fingers can feel the friction when they’re wrapped around the body.

On the other hand, the A01’s flat sides means my fingers can get a better squeeze on the light without it rolling around. It reminds me of the flat sides of a handle on a screwdriver. Also, the flat sides curve into the head. You can see it near the battery orientation drawing. This curving gives a natural resting point for my thumb as well as my index finger wrapped around the underside. When I twist my wrist back and forth, I really feel like I’m gripping a mini screwdriver.

I suspect the flat sided design was intended to make two handed twist operation a little bit more effortless, like a screwdriver. Whether this works any better than the Ti3, I can’t tell. Right now, I’m calling the A01’s body design as something “different”.

  • I like that the instructions for how to turn the light on/off as well as the battery orientation are written on the flashlight itself. That means fewer questions from people who are not regular flashlight users.
  • How can you say no to a $10 Nichia, high CRI light? It’s currently the cheapest way to introduce someone to the awesomeness of neutral white tint and high CRI compared to the cool white of most flashlights today.

One of my A01’s is quite finicky too. Depending on the tightness the lowest mode either flickers a bit or sometimes changes to medium when i touch the head part. The foam ring inside the head is not perfectly centered either. I have a feeling the foam will get shattered to pieces after some time.

Off what EyeballFryer and maukka are reporting, it seems the battery internal contacts could get improved. What we have here is a combination of both relatively high input current and low voltage, which means that just a small variation in the contacts’ resistance can exert a lot variance at the driver’s input voltage. We’re dealing with sub-Ω input impedances here and, although I’m no engineer, I’m pretty certain just a small cell rattling can have a significant impact in the feeding voltage the driver senses.

Cheers

P.S.: brad told me to @#$% somewhat less here. No worries. :slight_smile:

The UI on the d25aaa and this A01 are almost the same, too. Only difference being that the d25aaa adds a bunch of strobe variations. But this seems to have a reflector, and the d25aaa has a TIR.

I received mine today. The LED wasn’t centered correctly and the reflector had a burr. So I decided to do my first mod/repair/whatever. After watching mhanlen1s tutorial video I was able to reflow the LED and position it correctly.

Now I’m satisfied with this light :slight_smile:

Looks like a good like, its in the wish list.

Do you have a link to the mhanlen’s video ?

Thanks,
Mike

Sure: Flashlight Repair Tutorial: Reflowing an LED