Lumintop Tool (AAA) Mod

So I recently decided after losing my O’pen, that I “needed” a AAA light with a clip to replace it. The Lumintop Tool was the chosen host due to having a clicky and a nice matte black Type III anodizing, same as the O’pen before it.

First, a flurry of ordering and waiting for bits to arrive, by far the longest process…

To start, the host was opened up, the driver and XP-G2 were removed. The tailspring was shortened due to the extra height of the ATTiny.

Next up, a combination of wight’s 12mm FET+7135 10440 driver board the MTN-10DD kit, an ATTiny13 and a 7135 from RMM’s shop becomes an impossibly small FET+7135 driver. Note the red line on the driver: an extra jumper wire needed to be soldered for the 7135 to work.

Some filing/sanding is required to make the driver fit into the pill and lock into the cutouts to prevent rotation. A slot was cut into the pill for future access.

The BAT+ strap being quite thick and difficult to work with was shaped, pressed flat, soldered and sanded down for an extra ~0.3mm as the battery otherwise protrudes and prevents contact with the tailcap.

Next up was reflowing that tasty 4000K Nichia 219C from Cutter with my super advanced reflow setup :slight_smile: That thing that looks a lot like a hot air tool is just random piece of metal used to hold down the star.

The process taken is fairly simple. Heat up and wet star with excess solder, scrape the solder flat using the edge of the chisel tip, do the same with the LED. Coat star with a little bit of flux. Place star on heat resistant surface, position LED, crank up the power on the soldering station, heat the star until the LED reflows.

To help dissipate heat, some copper wire (It’s amazingly hard to find copper sheet locally) was packed into the pill and then filled with solder to act as extra thermal mass to reduce heat sag in turbo.

The pill is assembled and due to not having a ready supply of Kapton tape and the real possibility of a short, an insulating frame is cut out of some plastic packaging.

Last but not least, Toykeeper’s (very well documented) BLF-A6 firmware is programmed in after some tweaking of the modes and battery values to suit. One nice thing about the ATTiny being on the battery side is that the SOIC clip can go straight into the head for programming.

For reference, the values for battery voltages for my chip are (Using a lab supply and DMM to check):

4.20 - 194
4.00 - 185
3.80 - 176
3.500 - 162
3.000 - 138
2.800 - 129
2.700 - 125

It appears that the voltage to value relationship is linear, just taking the values for 4.2v and 2.7v and plotting the rest should yield adequate results for the battery warning.

Less than 2 years ago I would never have envisaged anything more than buying a different LED or driver from one of the Asian online outfits, certainly there were no decent AAA sized options available. In short, BLF has been amazing!

Moon mode works with PWM 1 and uses 2.73mA, which should be sublumen.
Turbo uses 2.70A (thanks to the low vF of the 219C) which should give about 840 LED lumens according to djozz’s testing.
(i.e. almost a 1000:1 ratio of brightness can be called at will)

Finally, I can put this thread to rest.

nice worklog!

thanks for sharing :slight_smile:

Wow! Awesome modding!

Wow testedandbaked, you did the almost perfect Tool-mod with the newest led and the best driver (almost, perfect would be AAA compatibility too). I'm jealous of your skills, I can do a lot but not programming/flashing drivers, you master every aspect of modding and used it all.

Awesome guide and mod, thanks!
From what I can tell, Tool is best AAA sized light for modding, right?
I need a new small light for daytime carry in fifth pocket and this looks perfect!

Would be nice on the copper Tool in the works….

Nice upgrade!

Holy. That is a crazy cool mod!

Djozz said it perfectly. What an orsm effort. Hats of to you. Your not my neighbor are you?

And I’m jealous. Once I get serious with modding I’m going to do something like this since I’m a huge fan of “AAA” sized lights. A “Key-pocket rocket” for sure!

Phil

after seeing this, I’m just supposed to go back to using my regular old Lumintop Tool I’m so stinking envious of you modders.

Only the copper tool would make this better

Holy schmoly, what a mod. In the Book of Luke is said: “… it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man ….” Well, if I ever need a camel on the other side of a needle, you’re the go-to person. You describe it like anybody can do this, but this is far beyond the limitations of my eyesight. Awesome! One tiny remark. When I need an insulating piece of plastic that size, I use self-adhesive hole-reinforcing rings. Bigger rings I (also) cut out of a piece of plastic packaging.

Paypal sent ..... :P

never mind ...let me just send you my credit card .

Beautiful work

Thanks all for the wonderful comments. I didn’t quite expect so much praise :shy:
This mod is very much only possible as a result of the works going on at BLF. Buying PCBs made by BLF members, flashing firmwares developed “in-house” and well-documented testing to back up our choice of emitter.

Thanks for testing out the 219c for us! In theory, AAA compatibility is possible… you would need to stack the original boost driver on top and wire the one free pin of the ATTiny to a transistor (?) to shut off the boost circuit when battery voltage is above 1.8v and turn it on when below. For PWM control, wire either the FET or 7135 control in parallel with the boost circuit. Finally, as the ATTiny can’t work with such low voltages, you must use the output of the boost to power the ATTiny. Of course, the voltage reading will be off so you would use the final free pin to read the true battery voltage. On the software side, you would have to put all that extra detection logic into 1k of memory. I dare someone to do it J)

Programming is the easy part; I don’t even know how to code. You will need a usbasp programmer and SOIC clip, had for a few coins on fleabay. Connect everything together then download AVRDUDESS (AVRDUDE with a nice gui), write the correct fuse bits (Low:0x75, High: 0xfd for BLF-A6, probably others too), download a .hex file from Toykeeper’s repo, select and hit Program. To tweak, get Atmel studio and the .c source file, change a few numbers, press F7 to build and flash the resultant .hex file. Not as hard as you think.

I could be, though with 3 million people in Melbourne, the chances are fairly slim :slight_smile:

I’ll keep that one handy!

its time to steal this away from you

Update: Spring bypass done

Beamshot comparison (disclaimer, the wall is not white, the camera is a phone)
1/100s ISO110

Left: Convoy S2 with Nichia 219B (4500k) driven at 1.42A ~400 Lumens
Right: Lumintop Tool with Nichia 219C (4000k) driven at 2.70A ~840 Lumens

Wow, great mod. Kinda takes your breath away. A new bar has been set for AAA size lights……

c’mon, 840 Nichia lumens? In my lil Lumintop Tool AAA light?

could u start offering these up? I’ll pay anything.