I came across this.
Pretty cool!
wight will be along shortly to tell you that you are wrong…ask me how I know 
I have an old capacitor+shake light. It’s a neat idea, but very large for its output… and I can’t take it anywhere because the large magnet inside has a relatively large field of effect so I can’t get it near any of my electronics. Also, the massive capacitor has mostly died since I got it like a decade ago, so it only emits light now during shaking. Even when it was new, it needed recharging every 5 minutes or so, and a charge took a full minute of vigorous and somewhat awkward shaking.
If I can get it to work again for long enough, I should try to get a lumen measurement. I suspect it’s only like 3 lumens though.
So, it’s currently in a box labelled “Old Lumens”, where I keep all my cool old lights.
It looks like technology has improved since then. This guy can get it fully charged in 3 seconds, and he didn’t mention how long it’ll run but it seemed like at least a few minutes. Still the same issues with size and magnetic field effects though.
It wasn’t a Nightstar was it?
I was given one of the original “Forever Flashlight”s, made by Excalibur (IIRC). At the time, I was kind of wanting a dynamo-based one, but someone misunderstood the item on my gift suggestion list and gave me a shake model. Still pretty cool, but the dynamo ones can make as much power in a few seconds as the shake ones do in a full minute… and they tend to have longer runtimes too, since they typically use a small battery instead of a capacitor.
Of course, the battery-based models tend to die of old age even faster than the capacitor-based ones. I later ended up with a cheap crank model which now has a dead battery, but it might be interesting to replace the battery sometime. I think it’s a cheap 10180 (or maybe even smaller) Li-Ion cell. Being in a hand-crank charger is torture for batteries though, which probably explains why the batteries die so fast. Well, that, and the battery was probably UltraFire-quality to begin with.
Best flashlight video ever. :bigsmile:
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was implying.
Also, I found my old shake light today and discovered there’s no way I’ll be able to measure its brightness. The capacitor is so old it self-discharges in about a tenth of a second… and I don’t really feel like taking it apart to put in a new supercap since it was kind of a useless light even when it was new.
Maybe it could be a fun mod host later, at some point in the distant future… but I kind of doubt it. If I junked all its guts though, it could fit 3x32650 and still have room left over.
Yea, got one here at the house in the middle of Katrina land. It has not been used in a while so you have to “reform” the capacitor, which is awkward looking to do so. I all so have a dynamo based all-in-one radio, light (15!) LED, and 120db siren (right) for extended outages. Katrina was 13 days before power was restored.
The light in the video blows mine away…
Oh, you can “reform” a capacitor?
I looked up info on how to do that. It didn’t really help, since I don’t have a 30,000 ohm resistor and a variable DC power supply. So, I tried just shaking the light for like 20 minutes instead.
It worked!
So, I measured the output:
- 3.6 lumens at start (and it drops *fast*)
- 2.0 lumens after ~30 seconds, though I didn’t time very carefully… might have only been 20 seconds.
I doubt I can really do a useful runtime test since I have a barely-sort-of-revived capacitor, but I think it will probably provide a usable amount of light for at least a full minute. So, basically, it’ll probably have to be shaken constantly during use. When it was new, it needed to be recharged every 5 minutes, perhaps every 10 minutes. And the beam is this weird aspheric pattern, not like a SK-68 or any other aspheric I’ve ever used. I tried the optics on some of my other lights, and the result was just terrible no matter what the distance was between emitter and optic.
Anyway, there you have it. About two or three lumens.
common with big photo flash guns where recycling the flash is “reforming” the cap for full capacity. Your Excalibur instructions says the same thing, but no one in my family has the stamina, grin.
OT
BTW, where did you get plans for your light box? I saw a post where the guy paper mache’d a ball then separated to make a integrating sphere. Cool!
…digging up info for my own.
Oh, er, I haven’t gotten around to making a proper integrating sphere yet. I’m just using a milk carton style light box like what selfbuilt uses. Hopefully one of these weekends I can find time to make a big mess with newspaper and glue and build myself something nicer.
I have some basic pictures of the light box build, but I haven’t put up a thread about it yet. The plan is to include details for four different methods of measuring lumens, and I have three of them done.
Kinda like the shakeweight…haha
Someone gave us a pack of those maybe 10 years ago in various sizes. They were so bad, we threw them out. Of course nowadays I would’ve kept one just because I’m a collector. I don’t think you can beat a small solar panel or solar lantern for emergency power and light. And mama always said I’d go blind shaking my shake-light.
I did some beam shots for mine. It’s kind of terrible.
Overall, it looks like this. The beam pattern is mostly forward, but some light also comes out sideways and even backward.
A bit closer, that beam looks like this, overexposed:
In reality, it looks more like this in person:
And a bit farther from the wall, here’s a detail of what the hotspot itself looks like (slightly underexposed to show detail better):
Now, that’s what I call a pretty beam! 
Same beam as the crank lights. I have a Duracell crank light with a radio and USB output, which almost seems useful
Oh, BTW… after I did the photos above, I left the light on to discharge the capacitor. Then I forgot about it. When I found it in the morning, the LED was still lit up enough to see a difference between “on” and “off” when I shined it directly at my eye in a lighted room.
I was pretty surprised it still had photons coming out 12 hours later, even if it was less than 0.01 lumens. Not quite as low as my RRT01 can go, but it was getting close.
Sorry about the repost Warhack-AVG.
hahaha!
Thanks for the laugh!
are pretty much what my Forever Light looks like. Hitting someone with your head lights trying to get one of these things going may cause a wreck?
There were counterfeits on Amazon where batteries were in place of the capacitor. Needless to say the reviews were bad.
As to practical; I would bet on the dynamo crank lights, near instant output, for the “forget and go” trunk light. My “Faraday Light” takes a lot of linear effort after 2 years on the shelf. The rotary dynamo may lend itself to water or wind driven power supply as a back up to solar for primitive camping.
It’d be nice to get the capacitor in the OP into a light which is a bit more practical. Something without a massive magnet which prevents it from being carried near any electronics, and also small enough to carry around.
I think a dynamo would allow the magnet(s) to be much smaller, but then it needs a way to spin the thing and it’d probably be an odd size/shape. I wonder if there’s a way to reduce this human-powered-light idea into something the approximate size and shape of a Convoy S3 or a maybe a Trustfire A8, 1x18650 or 1x26650 tube lights. Not a lot of room to build a physical charge mechanism in that sort of host, but it’d be a much nicer size if someone can figure out how.
Perhaps if the charge mechanism can be figured out, it could just have some sort of replaceable head to swap out the emitter and reflector depending on what type of usage is intended. Maybe the charge system could even fit into a P60 host? I’m probably just having pipe dreams…