I expressed a wish to test this driver and Jim arranged these two and sent them for a review. The drivers in question are:
http://www.manafont.com/product_info.php/17mm-37v42v-1100mah-mode-led-circuit-board-p-5579
I never came across these drivers before and i was courious how they perform.
The drivers are actually indentical. The 5 3 and single mode are acomplished by shorting a pin or few pins on an IC present here.
On the left circuit board we can observe the 3 pins that needs to be shorted to make this 5 mode driver to single.
This does not bother me at all actually i like this option. Makes the driver very flexible.
I decided to try this on a KD 5 mode R5 dropin i had which came with a 501host i needed for a uv dropin. It turned out the stock driver on that dropin was overdriving the R5 very hard and i was very happy when manafont's driver actually came so i can save this dropin from frying himself.
This is the KD R 5 mode dropin with the MF 5 mdoe driver installed. The driver is 16.66mm in diameter but i still managed to do a decent soldering job.
The other driver is what was in the dropin. I never bothered to identify it since 2.4A tailcap draw on high was too much for my taste.
On to the test!
Battery 18700 2400mAh XTAR 4.17V - Manafont 5m driver and cree R5:
- High - 2180 mA !!!
- Med - 1040 mA
- Low - 150 mA
Immediately stopped. Cheched my DMM on a few other flashlights and it was reading correctly.
Apparently this driver is not very suitable for the low Vf R5 emitters have.
Okay a higher Vf will be tested. I happen to have a Warm Q5 or something i have to write a review of. I have to post the review but have done all the measurements and photos needed already.
Below the photo of the P60 dropin. Since the stock soldering job was awful i decided i would swap the driver and do a cleaner soldering job.
Battery 18700 2400mAh XTAR 4.17V - Q5 Warm white Manafont dropin:
- High - 1250 mA
- Med - 450 mA
- Low - 80 mA
Its actually a 5 mode dropin in stock form (H-M-L-STR-SOS).
Battery 18700 2400mAh XTAR 4.17V - Q5 Warm and Manafont 5m driver:
- High - 1650 mA !!!
- Med - 810 mA
- Low - 150 mA
Again this puzlles me as what the driver was designed for? Tried the single mode a hour later and measured +- 1-2% of differnece in the output at the only mode it was capable of (without fiddling).
At this point the driver is unsuitable for anything except for a R2 based thrower flashlight when the user would want to drive the emitter very agressively.
I would like to thank Jim from Manafont for sending the drivers for testing. Unfortunately these did not turn out what we wuld expect from them. Perhaps it is worth investigating a bit since i can't think of a normal use for these drivers. It could be a "funky" batch with a mismatched resistor. The current draw is about 35% off (too much) in both cases. Since The R5 was scary bright i knew the efficiency was not low and the R5 was in fact been heavily overdriven.
I had high hopes for this one. I will try to inquire if there was a faulty batch otherwise the driver is unusable except for perhaps Match who might attempt to use one to drive 2x R5 emitters in parallel. :)