Astrolux TB-01 Bullet, impression

Hi all, I bought an Astrolux TB-01 Bullet. It is as small as you can make a flashlight around a stack of three button cells and a 5mm led. It is bright too, direct drive with a small current limiting resistor. I did not measure lumens but I’m sure it is not the advertised 45 lumen, I will add the real number later to this post. It is cheap too, in a deal it was $2.50 shipped.
I bought two and now modded one with a 5600K 96CRI Yuji led, which is nice, but I have only 8 lumen leftover, even though the resistor was bypassed.

Now for the worthless part: this light suffers from the traditional twisty problem, and that at its worse: unscrew for switch-off with a minimum of threading :person_facepalming: . Meaning that the head will fall off at a random moment, if the light is on your keychain probably within a week.

The electrical contact is made by a small protrusion on the tail part surrounded by a tiny o-ring. I removed the small o-ring and put a larger one in the battery tube so that the twisting became stiffer and the head will not fall of as easy. Still not ideal but it helps a lot:

A few more threads would have helped, or a different way of making electrical contact, but this is not the way…
Still happy with it though :slight_smile:

thanks for you time Jos :+1:

Seems nice for that price , even if you need to mod it a little :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks mate! These look cool but i am not to keen on the batteries.

Just pack grease on the threads so its harder to move lol the grease should should help fill in the threads.

I have the copper one.
Needed some filing to make it actually work though…
i shortened the battery tube a little, also filed down the small protrusion on the tail a little.
The tailcap screws in a little further now.
I think i also replaced the biggest O-ring with a fatter one.

Djozz, how did you get the LED and PCB out?
Does it need heat?

No heat, a wooden plug and a hammer, straight onto the led.

This is not a clean job, the PCB may be damaged a bit. And I never found out how the ground ring on the PCB makes contact with the body, I ended up scraping away ano inside the tube and making a solder blob sticking out to the side.

Okay, so it’s a very tight press fit.
I just put it in a vise and it wouldn’t budge with a little force…
(Thinking about putting an XM-L2 in it. :slight_smile: )

I love tiny lights, but it was my Nano’s habit of eating too many expensive cells and always being run-down when I needed light that pushed me into LiIon cells and lights. I’ll never go back :sunglasses:

Phil

It’s a nice little light but I’m afraid the battery replacement will cost more than the flashlight itself.

Meh, a blister pack of these are not expensive over here (“Action” store).
The light comes with a set of spares too, and after a few months on my keyring it’s still bright on the first set of button cells.
The included batteries come as 3 in series in a shrink wrap.
you’ll need to make some sort of inner sleeve for the batteries when the included ones are depleted, or put them in a shrink wrap too.
But it looks like they’ll last about 6 months, so that’s 6 button cells a year.

I have Streamlight Nano and used it as keychain. The batteries that came with it were quite efficient and took months to run out. Then I replaced the batteries with cheap blister pack but the performance was very poor. I hope it’s just my “luck” :smiley:

like the look of this, specially the copper one.
But indeed those cells, yikes
sticking with my wuben with build in charging of the cute little li ion cell :slight_smile:

Thinking about buying one to replace the 5mm led with a red one and have a small flashlight to read maps and look for things around at night. :smiley:

Yeah, cheep button cells may be disappointing…

It is MUCH MUCH smaller than a 10180 light.
You practically don’t notice it on your keyring.

Replacing the LED may be disappointing, because it has a high power 5mm LED with a fairly decent efficiency.
So it’s not your average 5mm LED.
It will do better with a true power LED like XM-L2 (i bet we all have some of those lying around), which will be much more efficient.
But you’ll need some kind of lens to protect the dome.

I just opened mine, and it seems the resistor does nothing.
Battery touches the - leg of the LED and the + leg is bent outwards to make contact with the bullet.

I suspect these LED and resistor on PCB are originally designed (and made) for something else.

I just put it back together again by the way.
It still works. :slight_smile:

The Spy is smaller and more powerful

It’s not smaller, only shorter. :wink:
It’s more cm³.
You can’t get one for $4 either.
I didn’t know the Spy was that tiny though. :+1:

and compared to the Hobi Fairy. It looks similar but the Hobi Fairy is bulkier and much heavier.

I picked up a few of these too. One copper, one stainless and one aluminum. Of the three, only the copper one worked out of the box. The other two don’t make connection. They’re relying on nothing but a little solder blob at the driver end to make the positive connection. All solder blobs being slightly different, some are tall enough to make connection and some aren’t. If they added a few more threads and maybe a small spring at the driver end these would be nice little lights. As everyone who has one has mentioned they’re crazy small. They look better than I expected too and at such a cheap price coming with 2 sets of batteries they’re really quite a deal…if they work. The light output is enough to walk to the car and for little quick tasks like finding something under a desk, etc. If they are willing to resolve a few little things these will be nice gift lights but as it is I can’t gift something when 2 of 3 were DOA.