What did you mod today?

Would love one set if shipping is reasonable, i would love to try and assemble one if it is possible only by hand work, don’t have any power tools for the job.

Main work is:

  1. Chech how does pill enters tube (mid part). It should be pressed inside, if it can not be pressed sand pill OD.
  2. When pill is pressed and you are screwing this set into host measure how much distance between tube end and host. Then you need to cut this distance from part of host with internal thread

Pill is press fitted into the tube that is used for the focus and then screwed into the host, then measure for clearance for the optics and led star and then cut the required size off the host? It does not seem that hard, but i cant find any 14500 battery around, had few dunno where they went, might be thrown away, so im out, sorry for taking ur time :slight_smile:

Would using DC fix work also (I don’t know… I’m just asking)? Also, there was someone here who bought a quantity of DC fix and was selling smaller pieces, but I don’t recall who that was…

I modded a 'On the Road' i3 today. It is a little 16340 zoomie with glass lens. It was a deal on Gearbest, but still over 20 dollars (coupon still works I believe, see their thread). But I must say it is a pleasure to see a small zoomie for once that is well build: good materials, brass pill, quality glass lens, accessable and servicable clicky, nice wide flood, good output. Only downside: the very cool tinted XP-G2. It is small, even for a 16340 light, but of course you never beat the Olight S1, here it is compared to a few of the smallest 16340 lights:

Here's what you get and what's inside the light, the 'on the road' battery actually measured 700mAh:

That is a nice padded pouch, but I'm not going to use it for this light. The driver is a typical generic chinese flashlight driver, this type has a nice high frequency invisible PWM btw. The o-ring that is seen before the battery tube is what the lens sits on, it looks broken but it actually is meant this way, not going fully round to allow air to pass when the head is zoomed in and out. Of course this implies that the head is not completely waterproof. The aluminium disk screws down the ledboard and functions as a sort of diffuse reflector for a bit of extra spill light. The switch board can be accessed from the outside by screwing out a disk from around the boot cap.

I modded the light with a 4000K 90+CRI XP-G3 and a BLF-A6 driver. Initially I went for a Banggood X5/X6 Bistro driver but I did not get the UI to work properly: did not manage to disable the annoying initial bad set temperature control.

The led was soldered on a 16mm Noctigon that was soldered onto the brass pill. The stock light focusses beyond the sharp die image when in spot position, so the extra thickness of the Noctigon brought the die exactly in focus.

The 15mm stock driver is contained in a thin brass ring, without the ring the pill can accomodate a 16mm driver. The BLF-A6 driver could be easily sanded down to 16mm without cutting vital traces/via's or other problems.

I do not like the 'reflector' so I made it black with heater paint, I also blackened the red Noctigon around the led with a marker. Better!

When the light was finished it was clear that you do not want this led die in focus, it looks like this, but in reality even uglier:

So I removed the pill again and put a thin copper ring behind the rim of the pill, so that the slider stops early and the light focusses short of the sharp die image. I lost some throw but the beam is much much better! I'm sorry, I did not make pictures of how the copper ring is sitting.

Finished:

Output on highest setting with the head in flood position: 760 lumen after 3 seconds, 680 lumen after 30 seconds. The flood is wide and very even in tint and intensity, just some yellow on the very edge, the spot setting has about 10 times the throw of the flood setting (estimated, not measured). This is not a champion thrower but has a very usefull flood and a very useful spot. A high CRI pocket rocket, this will be my EDC the coming period :-)

Now for something quite weird: I made a reflector light with this same type of led yesterday, in fact they were next to each other in the same piece of reel. The beam of that S8 light has artifacts, the tint was quite yellow in the spill and blueish in the hotspot, nice enough but not great. Now this zoomie on the other hand has a beautiful tint, almost as rosy as the original high CRI Nichia 219A. totally different, very hard to believe it is the same type of led. I made a beam picture of the two lights next to each other, for once the tints in the picture are quite realistically what I saw, left the above zoomie, right the S8 reflector light:

Can you believe that? If you look directly at the leds next to each other on moon setting, I see a difference but it is not that obvious at all.

So is this the optics doing this? (in other words: is the reflector screwing it all up?). Or is there a huge tint variation within the leds in the same reel?

In any case: XP-G3 + aspheric lens : great even flood, but make sure the die is off-focus in spot-position

Forgot to mention: the stock ‘on the road’ i3 has a clear and annoying wide ring in the beam. This ring can be reduced to hardly noticable if you blacken the edge of the glass lens with a black permanent marker.

That tint variation is scary. I hope it’s a freak anomaly.
It reminds me of the variation I got between an Olson square and SSL of the same temperature and CRI.

I killed the driver on my stock Convoy S2+ fooling around with a DMM's lead's, so I replaced it with a Convoy LD25 and swapped the emitter with a XP-G2 S2 0D Noctigon I had in reserve-

Beamshot definitely leans towards the blue side

DC fix, sputtering, or an OP reflector will all minimize it. Some optics will also work well if they have a small amount of diffusion built in.

Got a Package yesterday from RMM.
Bunch O Shtuff.

Threw together an S2+ grey with FET + 7135 ( MTN17DDm-NUV) guppy dual and spring bypass and XML2 U4 1C.
Light was done before my 1st Coffee this mornin.

2 more S2+ hosts here and some FET triple parts for XPL HI and 219C. But no copper pill to get those done.

Very nice mod, but only 10 nights per charge?

I’ve been using my oldest CNQG brass 18650 light for a night light lately, still with its original XP-G emitter and nanjg driver. But I gave it new firmware. The new “good night” mode blinks out voltage then goes to a ~10 lumen mode and slowly decreases for about an hour until it shuts off and goes into sleep mode. I shut it completely off after waking in the morning. It looks like it’ll last about a year per charge. Would something like that work for you?

I’m not concerned about waking up in the dark though; I mostly just wanted some dim ambient light at bed time so my partner and I can see each other before falling asleep. It’s a bit unfortunate when a goodnight kiss lands on a nose or eye or something. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Before that, I was using a ZL SC52 on its brightest moon mode. It gets about 2 months per charge. Not as bright, but still bright enough to see reasonably well (IMO, but I’m super photosensitive).

I guess I’m just a little surprised at the low lumens-per-watt of the amber emitter. It sounds like it’s getting around 25 lm/W?

Today I finally modded my light saber, since the rest of the parts came in. I added a recharge/kill port and a recessed lighted switch.

It was kind of a pain; took a few hours. I had to unsolder parts more than once after messing something up… like when I had it all put together and realized I connected the switch light to the wrong charge port post. Much swearing ensued, since the fix involved working in a very small enclosed space full of thin brittle wires.

Oh, and I also made a fake battery I can plug in and put in a charger, to check or charge the real battery without removing it. Because every time I open the hilt I risk damaging the battery and electronics. It’s weird putting a dummy cell in a charger and having it actually work.

I’ll have to put up pictures later; for now I think it’s time to relax.

You should help them design a more mod friendly module/pill/light engine design and retire to Naboo.

Now you mention that, I re-measured the light and you are correct, I measured it wrong before, I probably did the current reading with the clamp meter at a too high range for these low readings. I now used a DMM at mA current setting:
The second mode is 3.1 lumen, at 16.1 mA. The led would be at 2.8V but the 7135 just burns everything off up to say 4V, so the efficiency OTF is 3.1/(4x0.0161)=48lumen/watt. Still not great because I measured the bare led (link), at 0.2A, at 113 lumen/W, in a flashlight there should be 90lm/W leftover, but times 0.7 caused by the the overvoltage burn-off, so 63lumen/watt. Perhaps at very low amps this led becomes less efficient (or every led? never looked into that actually).

Anyway, runtime suddenly went up to 19 nights of 11 hours :slight_smile:

My brand new mi-7 had been opened up :

Cracking the the threadlock and opening the bezel :

Head disassembling :


Switch assembly :

And now it’s baking at 250°C :

Trying to get a light grey instead of this ugly pinkish red… slowly :

Swapping the CW XP-L HI for a 219C :

JG, At such low current maybe a nimh with a boost driver or liion with a buck driver would be more efficient?

Ideally you are very right. :slight_smile:
In practice, the BLF-A6 driver is what I had and it does the job, there’s not many stock drivers that have a low mode as low as 16mA/3lumen. If there’s a buck driver for single li-ion cells out there that have that nice low mode I’m highly interested :slight_smile: . NiMh batteries will not do it either because whatever the efficiency of the system, for runtime (the light should last for the two weeks camping trip next week) there’s no better option than a high capacity 18650 battery.

technically a repair.
an ancient dorcy 1aaa.
put in one of those 5mm high cri.
it must have a million hours on it.dim sick blue.nearly useless till now.
neighbors kid has had it 10 years.
its the flashlight equivalent of linus’s blanket.
downs syndrome kid.

Okay, I did a write-up for my light saber mod. It’s on another forum though.

Short version: removed the obnoxious stock switch (was an “outie” so I kept bumping it by accident), replaced it with a better one (recessed, has a light inside), and added a charge/kill port so I won’t have to open the hilt unless something inside breaks. And I did a pretty messy job of it all, but it works and the mess is safely hidden inside. :slight_smile:

A large part of the reason for this mod is that the “SaberCore 2” driver board has ridiculously high power draw in standby mode, shown here after turning the blade on then off again:

Most of that 200mA seems to burn off as heat in one chip, which stays too hot to touch unless power is physically disconnected:

I hope the heat won’t be a problem, but I’ve already heard from one person whose driver refuses to boot unless they blow on the hot chip to cool it off. Their thread got removed from the forum by an admin though, which honestly gives me the chills because it’s kind of an important thing to know. I should probably get some thermal transfer cubes and stick one between the hot chip and the aluminum host.

A few pics:

Not actually the layout I followed, but close enough. All I changed was tapping the switch light off the driver’s power source instead of the blade LED. Here’s the actual layout I used:

I accidentally wired this wrong and didn’t realize it until everything was assembled enough to test. Oops. Much swearing ensued, since it’s a huge pain to move a wire after everything is all soldered together.

The switch had a few posts to connect too… and it had to be done with part of the hilt already in place.

On the driver, I only needed to access PWR+, PWR~~, and BAT~~.

Taking out the kill key causes power to be connected, as indicated by the lighted switch: (this switch uses 20ma … super-high current for an accent LED, considering the Kronos X6 tailcap is almost as bright at 0.5mA)

Magic trick and sanity check.

I made a fake battery so I won’t have to remove the real one. Every time I open the hilt, it risks damaging the internals.

But in the end, it works and all is well.

I can finally turn it completely off by putting a little plastic plug in the charge port. And soon I should have some 3D-printed plugs which are low enough profile to leave in during use, and merely need to be rotated to connect or disconnect power. :slight_smile:

It may be just a glorified green flashlight stick, but it’s really fun to play with.

That is ridiculous and so very awesome TK. :open_mouth: