I’ve found the box where I kept my old flashlights, which I thought I’d lost two house moves ago. This comes at a great moment, as my two actually good lights have stopped working a while ago but I find myself working in dark environments these days and the lighting I’m provided with (some crappy supermarket POS) isn’t cutting it. I was just thinking of buying new lights, but now I might just keep the money and delay further purchases.
The best light of the bunch is a single 18650 model (used to be a Shiningbeam L-Mini) into which I put a XP-G and a Nanjg-112A driver, configured into two-mode by grounding the first star contact.
I’d always been very happy with the performance of this light (the beam is spot-on for my purposes, the LED has a nice colour, the modes are perfect) and only shelved it after I got a Zebralight SC600 (now deceased) - with one significant issue: not with magic or prayer is there a way to get the driver to use a 18650 to its last. It’ll always start flashing low-voltage warning when the cell has more than half capacity remaining. I tried cleaning, I tried lubing, I tried resoldering, I tried replacing the switch, I tried adding copper braid between the spring and the negative contact… nothing worked. At the time this wasn’t a big problem as I liked to keep my batteries topped off and never used the light much, but now I actually need the capacity.
Is there anyone who still remembers hardware from a decade ago and might know if there’s a click ritual that might disable the “protection” feature? I remember some drivers having this as an option, but I’m not sure if the 112A had it. I’m fine with hardware modification too, if it’s what it takes.