I just received my FT03 which came with unglued bezel and perfectly centered LED…
Then everything went wrong very quickly.
I threw in a Samsung 40T 21700 and turned it on. It responded fine and I ramped it up to the top of the ramp. From my eyes it appeared brighter than expected. I double clicked for Turbo and…
The light shut off. The switch was blinking (I didn’t count how many blinks)
I tried to turn back on and no still off no response. I unscrewed/rescrewed the tail cap and it again responded to the battery offering a blink (extremely dim). I clicked and held for ramp and it does indeed ramp up and down but it’s now only putting out about 10 lumens on the top of ramp and the bottom is unbelievably low.
I switched out my 40T and threw in an LG HG2 and it does the same thing.
If I go to the top of the ramp and double click for turbo (either cell) it blinks but doesn’t change output. If I double click for strobe after turbo it blinks again but doesn’t strobe.
It clearly looks like something fried the second I tried to put it into turbo. I double checked this thread and saw that Tom E did some testing with 40T’s and didn’t experience this issue.
Any ideas? Things I can check? (Heat was not an issue - it was only on for less than 10 seconds)
I tried the following:
-factory reset through the UI and it did nothing
-I also unscrewed the battery tube and tail cap, checked for debris or dust and re-screwed firmly no change
-I used the FT03 battery meter and it reads 4.2V
-So I just changed it from Ramping UI to Mode-Set UI and here’s the results:
click – turn on very low
click 2 – increases brightness
click 3 – increases brightness
click 4 – no change
click 5 – no change
click 6 – turns off
Aren’t the FETs used in lights usually rated way higher than 4.2v and very high current? I got the impression we’re running them well under their specification but I could be totally wrong. Maybe you just got unlucky?
The MOSFET is fine seriously even a bad one can easily take 10A with almost no cooling applied like on bad designed drivers and are rated 50A or more with proper coolin
I had blown bond wires where the remains in the dome were still conductive a bit so the LED was in moonlight almost invisible and on turbo I got sort of 1lm Moonlight
This is gonna sound weird, but remove the bezel, reflector, everything ’til you get to the bare LED, and press down on the LED with your finger, and then try ramping it. See if it ramps up “normally” (but before you burn a hole in your finger).
I had a… TK05, I think… where the LED could’ve cooked off and made intermittent contact. Resolder, reflow, whatever it takes, to get a better connection, if the above works.
Of course the I3E doesn’t have a MOSFET and I understand that, however I think that is exactly what happened to an Olight I3E EOS I had about 3 or 4 years ago, when I heard it was okay to pop in a 10440 cell. So I put an Efest 10440 in it and probably got the 500 lumens that someone else said they got. It ran fine for the entire first cell, but on the second cell I though, that cell ran out of juice awfully fast.
Of course it was not the cell and my light did stay in a low moonlight mode of about 5 lumens maybe, until I trashed it. I got 3 of them for free for buying a lot of stuff from B&H or Optics Planet, don’t remember which one.
Now I have enough free time I would have examined it closer, but back then life was a blur.
How does the emitter look, does it look fried or ? it sounds like it got too much power and it died.
