Nice, I had seen the pictures but the text clarifies it further. It is a clever idea to put the measuring unit into a sliding tube so that an easy conversion can be chosen. I guess that you will maintain a separate multiplier for each hole size? Have you thought about adding an auxiliary light so that you can precisely tune your multiplier for each set-up? (for one of my spheres I used a very simple but extremely effective constant output auxilliary light, consisting of a 5mm led, and a LM317+resistor used as 8mA current regulator). In your design the auxilliary light would be even more convenient to use because of the sliding tube: before each measurement you hold the flashlight in measuring postion (switched off) with the auxilliary light switched on, and slide the tube with the luxmeter towards one value that you decided on beforehand and use for every measurement. In this way for each measurment the resultant reflectivity of your sphere (and thus the multiplier) is constant whatever the measuring situation.
I have been thinking about the concept of the sensor inside a tube. This way the sensor does not see the whole inner surface of the sphere but favours the piece of surface straight opposite of the tube. But on the other hand if the light bounces around enough times, that piece of surface should be a good measure of the total light flux of the source. Still I think that a sensor at the plane of the inner surface, ālooking aroundā, should be a bit better for integration.
Mjolnir is very well built with very little light loss inside the head. Mine build will suffer from light loss and it wont be perfect but does not need to be. With some trail and error i made the projection look very good actually, it does look a bit out of focus when shining at something that is less than 30m away but it sharpens on longer distance. I like it so its good enough for me
I am planing to swap the led for the 1mm2 white flat (cant remember that awful code name) but i need to find suitable driver for it, the black flat is direct driven at the moment.
I wont use anything other than the big lens, i am doing this because anything else will greatly complicate the build and i do not have knowledge and tools for doing all that. The lens i bought was from random seller on aliexpress and it fits okay-ish, not perfect but nothing that some adjustments canāt fix.
I raised the complete pill in order to bring the led closer to the lens and for now this is how its going to be, i might do something different in the future but for now it stays like this.
Challenging or not ill do my best and hope it will work
Go ahead and show us your project, i am very interested in trying that led also but it will wait some time, need to test out the 1mm2 first
I wanted to use the sliding tube only for one time calibration. Actually I do not have a calibrated flashlight (but I thought about buying it from @maukka). The result is that my readings are not absolute correct. But I think they are nearly correct. Since my measurements are not 100% correct, I also do not have to compensate for minor deviations due to a different port size. Because I do not know in which direction my measurements deviate.
Currently I am satisfied with the much more accurate measurements and the better linearity of my results.
It is a good idea to investigate if the different port sizes affect the measurement result. Here I can do some more tests by taking measurements with a small lamp with my old port bezels, which I put on the different port sizes of the sphere.
In the future, after possibly buying calibrated flashlights, I may also be putting an auxlary light on the sphere to recalibrate it over and over again for each individual flashlight.
For me it was not possible to put the sensor to the inside of the sphere because of the limitation of the measurment range of the luxmeter. And the opening of the tube to my sensor has a diffusor, which sees the whole inner surface.
If the light in the sphere is constant at each point, which is the main purpose of a sphere, than it should not matter for the results if the sensor looks inside the sphere or only inside the extermanl tube.
You do similar things with your double sphere.
The opening between the 2 spheres of my double sphere is very sharp edged so that light from everywhere in the first sphere can directly enter the second sphere. But using a diffusor at the entrance of your tube solves most of that, good addition!
BobbyMK, the Courui having a threaded emitter shelf makes a massive difference for focusing the emitter, nice copper shelf you have in that one!
I am curious how you went about isolating the thermal path from the negative pad? I forgot to do that in my Jaxman Z1, couldnāt figure out why I only had one mode after so carefully checking the driver before installation, lol. Me and my forgetfulness, lucky I didnāt fry the Black Flat straight away! I got a copper pill that Hoop made and in my absence of mind I re-flowed the 20mm copper MCPCB to the pill, directly shorting the Black Flat to ground. Duh!
Iām curious how you went about isolating the Black Flat from ground? The 32mm Noctigon is a good idea for it, gives a lot more thermal path, shame it canāt be re-flowed to the copper shelf you have thereā¦
Threaded shelf makes all the difference, without that this would be close to impossible without custom lens. The pill is from Kiril, he created that masterpiece
The led in this light its not isolated, in fact i do not even have a driver in there. To be honest it wont be used much more than showing off so for now it going to stay driverless. But with that said i do have CSLNM1.TG waiting to be installed i just need to get suitable driver that will be able to drive that led at 4.5-5A.
Modded a EagleEye X7 with Luxeon MZ
For the first quick mod, I used the original driver and soldered two R100 over the two R110.
To avoid donut hole with the SMO reflector, I used diffusor foil on the glas lens.
I get around 1300 Lumen. So I think the driver pulls around 5-6A in reference to Kƶf3ās LED test.
Quite a while ago I wanted to mod one of these little zoomies. I got around to doing some of that today. Was going well up until the point I found out the cell size I planned to use does not fit The same cell fits in the other host I have I might just change tack and buy a 14250 cell.
I used one of LED-4 Powerās dual footprint MCPCBs to mod a Q8 with 4x SST-40s. I drilled it so I can use the screws through the emitter shelf into the reflector. At one point I had a short between negative and the copper core which I burned out by running ~5A through for a millisecond or two.
I had to ream out the reflector to get the emitters and centering rings to fit right. The driver connection is made using some teflon jacketed 16AWG for the driver connection. I might have tried 14awg, if I had any with the thin teflon insulation. I think it would fit through the holes in the MCPCB, but it would have been pretty hard to make sharp bends.
I also swapped in a modified tailboard from one of my other Q8s. It has nested āblueā springs and enhanced contacts at the screw holes. I donāt have a calibrated setup for measuring output, and I didnāt have one at all before I started the mod, but itās about 1.6x as bright as my Sofirn Q8 and my 90CRI LH351D Q8.
Topped it all off by reflashing the driver to Anduril.
Itās my brightest light so far. It lights a much larger area than the Sofirn Q8, and lights it more brightly, too. Not bad. I may see if I can get more out of it.
Thatās quite a bit lower that Iād expect. I mean: lower that the measurements of XP-L HI stock.
Do you happen to have a measurement from before the mod? What LEDs did it have then? What is the XP-L bin?
I changed the LED three times. Still the same flashlight. XP-L HD comes from BLF Q8 so what BIN do I do not know, but I thought there would be more lumens. I am waiting for XP-L HI V2 and I will check performance then too. Until now they were:
The same cell fits in the other host I have 
I might just change tack and buy a 14250 cell.
