I did a board with a MOSFET to eliminate the extra resistance from the external switch
size 16-17mm, for 16mm the battery holder fins need to be cut a bit

Ordered 9 boards from Oshpark
Will take some time to get here to Germany and assemble them

Annoyed with the low output with remote pressure switches for flashlight?

I use a MOSFET with a low gate voltage which gets full output down to 1.8V

The MOSFET is powered by a CR1225 Lithium battery with 36mAh should run easily hundreds of hours on

Aliexpress has cheap remote switches, you could dismantle for the cable and pressure switch, or one that fits your flashlight
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-remote-pressure-switch.html

With a reverse diode added it could be used as well to charge a button cell over a bleeder resistor on main driver

^ wow, nice job Lexel, if it works as planned I guess you will have quite some customers for it. And the switch will be as good as silent too I presume.

I’m still stuck with the bezel of my X7R… it has been freezed in the freezer, then heated with the hairdryer but nothing seems to free it
I was frustrated so instead I put the 3*XHP70 in my X7 :

Thousands lumens of 80CRI 4500K goodness

X3 wrote:

I’m still stuck with the bezel of my X7R… it has been freezed in the freezer, then heated with the hairdryer but nothing seems to free it
I was frustrated so instead I put the 3*XHP70 in my X7 :

Thousands lumens of 80CRI 4500K goodness

4500K with CRI 80 is a really sweet light source

My R50 got the same flavour with an XHP50 yesterday… Kiriba-ru sure got some nice emitters, at a nice price

My first Smini. Emitter had to GO. Went with XM-L2 T6 4C on a 14mm Sinkpad. Was the Black with Cu body… Now it’s CRX inspired.

Very nice VW, very nice indeed!

vwpieces wrote:

My first Smini. Emitter had to GO. Went with XM-L2 T6 4C on a 14mm Sinkpad. Was the Black with Cu body… Now it’s CRX inspired.

!{width:60%}https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/7JfcsT3Pbs9tM_YCiWljCYPpIdaTu8JoHcVqYH...!

That turned out awesome! Guess I need an other s1 now.

Thanks DB and Geuzz.
Just a heads up there is a silver plating under the Black (PVD?) I literayy had to hand file it off the entire light where the Copper is exposed. Sanded with 220 on up to get it to polish as seen. Was a lot of work but looks neat.

Cool

Very handsome, vwpieces! So the black in the grooves is still PVD-coating, this finish will last very well, should still look nice with a patina.

NightHike wrote:

Testing a new tail-cap spring bypass for my headlight:
…

One thing I like to do with spring bypasses:

Cut a small piece of copper sheet into a disk and put that on the end of the spring facing the battery. Having a bit of copper there helps protect the solder from friction. The spring bypass tends to last longer.

CRX wrote:

Cool

CRX Approved, Thanks!

The Bezel and E-sw ring were the Blue. I tried the warm sodium hydroxide solution and no joy. They are Brass. To my suprise, it wasn’t till polishing it that the blue came off. The Lye may have actually helped a bit. The original emitter MCPCB is copper but super thin. To get the thicker Sinkpad in there I filed the bottom of the optic shorter and reamed out the bottom hole with a 60* reamer to fit over the XM and sit on the pad. Bad thing is that changed focus and the Smini now has a Square Spot. Like a zoomie but big. Mostly only seen on turbo.

This thing will be coming apart again. Change some things and mostly larger guage wires.

Thanks djozz.
Yes the black is the original coating, pretty hard stuff. The flats polished again after getting sanding scuffs.
Waiting for Patina….

Here’s my first LED project in a long time. It’s a 50W automotive light bar I purchased from Amazon that I’m modding into a UV inspection lamp.

Luckily when I opened the light up it used what I think are Cree emitters with the 3535 footprint. This made it easy since I was able to remove all of the LED’s and the 5 buck converters and reuse the MCPCB with the Lite-On 365nm emitters. Some jumper wires had to be soldered down to run the LED’s in series, but it wasn’t a big deal.

Here I was testing out the LED’s. My power supply maxes out at ~31V, so only 8 of them could be tested at a time.

The datasheet shows a Vf of 4.0 @ 500mA, but here it shows it to be closer to 3.45V.

9 of the LED’s have a consistent color, with one of them being noticeably “whiter”. This whiter LED still appears to fluoresce objects as much as the others, so I won’t bother to swap it out.

I mounted an aluminum project box to the top of the lamp for the dimming pot. It looks a bit ugly, but it’s good enough for this project.

The heatsink is more than adequate. At roughly 17W for an hour the temperature only reaches 33° C.

The only thing holding it back now is the window. The one that came with the light bar was made of polycarbonate and blocked nearly all of the UV. I have a piece of Starphire glass at a shop right now being cut to the appropriate size. I should have it back this week and the lamp will be complete.

Nice UV-bar! What kind of inspection would you use it for?

(One of those LiteOn’s that I tested was 3.6V at 500mA, but there was a clear design change at some point, that may have affected the voltage too)

Nice UV bar can you link the LED bars seller?

Just thought if you go for sapphire glass why not a ZWB2 filter glass installed?

The SST 10 UV may be also promising with XPL footprint and low thermal resistance
just the important thing would be to see what kind of Wastelight the SST has, like the Lite-On or no like the Nichia

that’s a nice aluminium case! i like it
Good mod by the way

djozz wrote:

Nice UV-bar! What kind of inspection would you use it for?

(One of those LiteOn’s that I tested was 3.6V at 500mA, but there was a clear design change at some point, that may have affected the voltage too)

Thanks! This one will be fixed to a printing press. Often clear coatings must be applied to the labels which is difficult for the press operators to see and register to the images. A small amount of optical brightener is added to the coatings formulation (usually less than 0.5%) allowing it to glow when viewed under UV. This lamp will be an upgrade over the fluorescent blacklight lamps that we’ve used in past. Those tube lamps don’t produce enough UV to make some colors of optical brighteners to fluoresce.

Lexel wrote:

Nice UV bar can you link the LED bars seller?

Just thought if you go for sapphire glass why not a ZWB2 filter glass installed?

The SST 10 UV may be also promising with XPL footprint and low thermal resistance
just the important thing would be to see what kind of Wastelight the SST has, like the Lite-On or no like the Nichia

Thanks, sure… Here’s the Amazon link.

The bandpass filter would be a nice addition. I looked at filters briefly a few weeks ago, but wasn’t able to find one with the correct dimensions or one that wasn’t outrageously expensive. Maybe there’s a ZWB2 film that can be applied to the glass window? I haven’t looked into that yet.

If this lamp does works well, I’ll have to assemble several more. Next time I can mix it up with the SST-10 LED’s and do a comparison. I’ve been wanting to play with the Luminus UV emitters since they starting releasing these less expensive variants.

Can you link the Luminos Emitter?

ZWB2 filters should be cheap availiable in rectangular sheets
https://m.alibaba.com/product/60208864322/365nm-uv-led-ZWB2-UG1.html?s=p...

Im home alone tonight so I decided to mod my H03 side LED because dont like red colour as it’s not efficient.

Blue colour

Green colour

white colour without rubber boot

i also made AA vampire light from plumbing parts fits perfectly (just plug and play)

The light can run on dead AA bateries people throw in the bin and it will run about 2 weeks continuously

Forward clickie fit in perfectly.

no machining is needed

Plug and play. Your either a genius or an idiot. Hows the water leak?

Hey MDsDNF

It’s not water proof and I don’t intend to put in water rather use it as night lamp to drain dead AA batteries.

Although I can silicon seal the gap and put O rings but too much hassle

Sorry, I meant the water leak where there is now a hole in the wall where the tap was. . Just me being silly.

Here is the head MRsDNF

Had a spare XP-L 3D from the Astrolux S1 and decided to swap it to the Lumintop Tool AA.

Here’s the ceiling shot of Eagletac D25a Ti CW and Tool AA with XP-L 3D. Sorry about the cell phone photo as it does not capture the true color.

Firelight2 wrote:

One thing I like to do with spring bypasses:

Cut a small piece of copper sheet into a disk and put that on the end of the spring facing the battery. Having a bit of copper there helps protect the solder from friction. The spring bypass tends to last longer.

Good tip Firelight2. I’ve noticed with some of my bypasses that the solder has worn and has flat spots, but not too much to be concerned. If anything, the flat spots seem to help with conductivity. But I suppose at some point, the solder will eventually wear away too much, and then it will start to wear against the bypass wire or the spring.

Made my first attempt at “De-Anodizing” a light.
I turned my black anodized A6 , into a shiny , black “highlighted” A6.

Nice, diggin' the black & metal.

I reworked the Olight TC-10 Ti spare battery case again today. It's been a few different versions, MT-G2, XM-L2

Now it is XP-L2 HD V4 3C 5000K 80CRI.

I filed out the tube to take a 16340 cell and enlarged the bezel hole for a reflector. I used a pill module from an OTR M3 with lighted switch this time, 2000k resistor feed for the green electronic switch LED. Still turns red when the LVP warning kicks in.

DTP 20mm KD MCPCB, magnetic tail with copper and lockout function. Around 730lm on turbo.

Made my first 3D printed lens cap. I want to make for every flashlight of mine above 35mm head diameter.
First I made one for my Emisar D1 because it is small and I not wasting too much filament with setups. I made 4 rings of the top 3mm to test fitment and then made the final product.
I think I will try to make diffuser for my Q8 but I need to use it with low power not to melt it.