Extremum - 550 lumen from keychain flashlight

Hi. We've built a usual keychain flashlight with an unusual feature - it's output is 550 lumens.




It has 3 level of brightness:






And a strobe light.
We want to ask your opinion - do you like the idea of powerful keychain flashlight with extra wide beam?

p.s. Soon we'll add video with real world comparisons with other flashlights

Hi,
Is it a 10180 battery light?
550 Lumen sounds like fun ! :smiley:

Can you send me one to review it? :wink:

Yep, it’s a 10180 battery inside.

This is our second project on Kickstarter. Here is a link to the draft project:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1727819497/1059833774?token=07e02905

So right now we have only several prototypes. But we always produce what we promise.

You can check our first project and users reviews:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1727819497/cardlight-powerfull-flashlight-in-a-size-of-credit?

Wow! Which cell do you use? Are they available sold separately somewhere? I’m very interested in a 10180 keychain light with 550lm output! Thanks for posting! :money_mouth_face:

10180 110 mah li-ion battery. It’s rather hard to find but nothing is impossible :wink:

We’ll start crowdfunding campaign in a week (at least we hope to do that :smiley: ) and if you really want this project move from several prototypes to mass production we’ll ask you to support us.

Just went to your draft page and watched the video. It has a tail switch!? This is truly a unique and awesome keychain light!

Yep! No idiotic screw-unscrew. We have dedicated micro controller inside, as you see. That’s how we’ve made strobe and mode selector.

By the way, what are your impressions from video? It’s not our strong side ;)) We’re better in manufacturing.

The video was fun to watch. I particularly liked the “monster” light with arms reaching for the tiny keychain light. It might be a bit juvenile, but I don’t think that’s a problem. I’d rather you have some fun and not take yourselves too seriously. The video got the point across (to me anyway) that the tiny light is not to be under-estimated!

I’ve a question about the “dedicated micro controller” you have there. Is that one of those purpose-built, non-programmable LED driver controllers? If so, you’d get more fans here by changing to some kind of programmable micro controller such as ATtiny or PIC. Look around this site a bit, and you’ll see that we love custom firmware, and we have several people here who write firmware for our drivers. You could grab a copy of ToyKeeper’s Biscotti driver firmware, and flash it to the minuscule ATtiny13a MMU chip, and sell many hundreds of your light here in a group buy. Look at some of our group buy projects to see the scale of what’s possible here. Your project needs $5000? You could get that in one group buy here. :wink:

550 lumens from a XML2 means ~1400mA
10180 rated 110mAh? Under this heavy abuse (how high do the temps get in the short period it works on 550 lumens?) how ong does it do 550 lumens and have you tried runnng the cell down like a 100 times to see how much of the 10mAh is left by then?

Did I see add $12 for a charger? what charger is that?

The Miller, I don’t know about his cell, but I have some few years old 90mAH cells from Veleno Designs. I’ve had those putting out ~1500mA before, for a short burst, without getting hot! :wink:

No, it’s our own controller, with our own firmware, on our own PCB. It isn’t compatible with other project.

Okay, that’s good to know! Thanks for the response! You could still do a group buy here and get well over your stated need of $5000, by the way.

I would buy one! :wink:

Hi. Good questions. Let me explain.
First - we need about 800 ma to drive XML2 to 550 lumens cause we’ve chosen a highest bin - U3.
3.7V*0,8A = ~ 3 watt (in fact we charge battery till 4.2V). Cree Xml-l2 U3 deliver about 150 lm @ 1 watt. But we have a focusing lens. So we refocus it’s from 170 degrees to about 80 and make bright almost uniform wide beem and add aditional lumens to the center spot. Please look at photos.

Second - led is mounted on thick aluminium pcb that works as a radiator (wtith a help of case of course).
Third - we’ve tried turbo mode till the discharge of a battery. It’s about 4.5 minutes of full pwer and ~ 3 minutes of still very bright light that is starting to fade. After 8 minutes it’s about 200 lumens left. 0-4.5 minutes is a full brightness. Highest temperature on the led during that experiment is 70 C while it is outdoors 25C

We tested cell 10 times and after that it has about 90% of life. We think after 20 sessions in turbo mode it’ll have only 50% of capacitance.
We’re honest about that - if you want such light from keychain you need to find a compromise.

s. Thanks for good technical questions!

s. We’ll show real world comparison and charger soon!

But why not an U4 bin!?

Eh… actually… according to CREE, you need ~1125mA to get 550lm out of XM-L2 U3. With losses in the lens, you’ll need probably close to ~1200mA to get 550lm out the front.

Did you test your light in an integrating sphere to see what the actual OTF light output is?

Eh? When we started that project U3 was the highest we could find. U4 already exists? :wink:

But don’t forget that we re-focus 130 degree light in a much more narrow beam. Without the lens Xm-l2 is 130 degrees width , with lens and reflector - ~80. Yes, you loose output on lens, but earn on focusing peripheral light to center.

Here