Haha. As you can see I was pretty excited to just rough something up and get a general idea of what to expect. For the next tests I will take the time to make a threaded adjustable sleeve and get everything perfectly centered and take real lux measurements as well. But who doesn’t like beamshots in the mean time?
Hoop's "7up zoomie" build for the 4th annual BLF / Old-Lumens challenge : machine equipment category
Should we duct tape the ducks bill up? 
7 of these lenses. Are you going to make them all converge together at a certain point, by having ever so slight of an angle on each stack up? Or are you going for the 7 headed hydra effect? Or... will they converge just because the lenses are small in diameter and that will bring the beams "close enough" like a SRK. Love those beam shots.
Won’t they converge already? Usually, you think about multiple LEDs under one lens not converging. But, I think if they each have their own lens, they should converge well enough on their own right?
The optics are all in the same plane and are very close together so the beam should behave just like any multi reflector light. The zoom should behave like any normal zoomie since the optics wont rotate.
I do intend to make the best possible beam shape by rotating each LED by 51.43°. (360/7)
Looks great! If you keep it just a bit out of focus, you should end up with a beautiful hotspot fading to spill with very little artifacts. Of course, you end up with a bit less throw as well. But, I don’t think you’d miss it with this 7x LED monster!
very interesting will be keen to to see it all done
Wow, lotsa technical stuff :nerd_face:
I’ll be watching :student:
Lot’s of maths and theory here - I like it! Question, do you still have your post about cutting threads with a lathe? 
I would like to read it. Have you considered that depending on the diameter and the pitch (is that the correct word?) of the thread you might have to angle your cutting steel slightly? Otherwise you might touch the thread with something else than the sharp part of the cutting steel.
Regarding the pattern of the 7 lenses - when I made my first multi emitter light I thought about the same. I would not recommend to focus all the beams at one point, because after that point the beams drift apart again. So the best is, as Hoop already said to have them all parallel to each other. They kind of converge, depens on your point of view. The distance between the single beams will always be the same, so nothing converges there. But if you look at the surface the beams cover, the further away you go the bigger the surface and the percentage of the surface which is not overlapping converges towards zero. Does anyone know what I mean? Hell, I am bad at explaining…
I like where this is heading! Lots of technical stuff here…
Yeah fritz, I get you. If the beams are parallel then the spread of each will overlap the others but not diverge more than what us the case for each one but if the separate beams converge at any given distance then beyond that they will diverge more than individual spread.
You’ve jumped into this fight also ! Good luck.
No way guys, I am not doing ANY math for this one.
I do still have my post about threading. It took me most of a day to compose. :weary:
Yea if you imagine how laser beams would act in this scenario… they could either converge at a focal point and then diverge after that point, or if arranged perfectly parallel, would never converge or diverge. Fortunately these little aspherics are nothing like a laser beam, and make a decent usable spot. They should overlap pretty well in parallel and make a single hotspot, barring any serious deviation in form.
Um, even a laser beam grows with distance, so multi’s would converge to cover a common area at some point… just much further down range. MUCH further.
At least, the laser’s I have show a larger hot spot the further away the hot spot lands… my 200mW green laser shows a substantial hot spot at 2.2 miles, probably 12’ across. My 3000mW blue laser won’t even reach that far.
Yea that’s true. My hypothetical perfect laser beam anecdote wasn’t too helpful.
The lasers would eventually appear to converge into pretty much a single spot due to the overlap. In the end the circles are so large that they overlap like so:
That should illustrate what fritz15 was explaining.
Deleted boring statement. Leaving post to lengthen thread for more diffuse picture additions. :zipper_mouth_face:
I thought my eyes had stopped doing strange things in the 70’s. They have started playing up again. 
Most of my early successful mods used Tasked drivers. George does very nice work…
Log update with some screenshots of the battery carrier model.
Might as well make some extra of those carriers while your at it