Good news then, seems I did well in gambling an extra buck into this new unit. Lots of people were/are reporting Lattice Wreck emitters on the (not so much) cheaper clones.
To be honest, I had never seen an XM-L2 before but, after switching it on for the first time it's light output was certainly reeking of my good old T6 XM-L. :-)
Pill is semi-solid, certainly gapped but more solid than hollow.
A quick tailcap measurement with standard 1m AWG18 test probes on my multimeter has shown nearly 2A of draw; no load battery voltage was 3'94-3'95V (edited: tailcap current draw increased a bit with a slightly more charged battery, 2+A). Pill's thread had received some thermal paste as lubricant and heat transfer enhancement.
The torch gets uniformly warm after a few minutes of use, it can certainly be operated continuously on high without heat issues.
After checking its innards I've applied thermal paste, upgraded the led's driving wires and slighly braided and re-centered its spring.
I pulled this driver out of an UltraFire C8.
It has 5 modes, High, Med, Low, Strobe, SOS.
It does this with 1 three legged IC, 1cap and 5 resistors.
I was just wondering if somebody could explain how this very simple driver does so much.
I did a few searches on the HG5K1 IC but only found somebody selling parts for a long range cordless phone :person_facepalming:
The 3-legged donk is the IC controller. Thereâs an R and C in parallel across the mains to âhold upâ the supply volts to the chip long enough to sense half-clicks, else it starts from 0 and ârebootsâ it the press is longer than the RC can hold it up. It probably senses the voltage drop before it craps out totally, and that registers as a âhalf-pressâ
The output is the 3rd leg, direct to the LED through the ballast resistors.
Thatâs pretty much it.
Another reason why I roll my ownâŠ
Oh yeah⊠try getting a drop-in thatâs rated 3-18V, even with a sticker attesting to that slapped on the side, and try using 2 18350s to put that to the test, and having the LED almost go incandescent.
ZERO regulation, just a small-value resistor being the only limitation when hit with twice the voltage. The LED went very blue and very dim. Miraculously survived the ~1sec it got hit with that before I broke the connection.
Nothing inherently wrong with LB emitters; theyâre just a generation behind, for when âgood enoughâ is good enough. Ie, in cheap clone flashlights.
Being that theyâre often grossly undersized (eg, got an XP-E sized emitter in a cheap C8 clone), I doubt itâd survive DDing.
Iâd bypass the IC and leave the parallelled resistors in series with the LED (ie, turning it into a 1-mode light stuck on âhighâ).
While I can live with a lower output/efficiency, the main problem is that those emitters are PoSes with regards to colour rendering, maybe because whoever makes them doesn't have the know-how to make good recipes of phosphor coatings.
The bad thing is they make 'em to resemble other manufacturer's emitters, âbuilt for fakingâ, instead of building their own good prestige. Screw 'em.
I have this one.
All you have to do in this light is to order the cheapest one.
Then order some low vf emitter you like, I have the XPL V5 Warm white (cold dedome). (Nichia 219c, or xpg3 is also very good, and cheaper)
Then move the wire from the driver to the other pad.
And swap the emitter.
All under 10-15$ and very little work.
P.S. The pill is hollow, but that is why you donât bridge any springs, and donât swap the wires to the led. It has natural limiting. And pulls ~2.5-4A on my XPL with a salvaged laptop cell.
Well, how is the pill on the cheapest ones? Because in the OP one it isn't bad at all, it has a hole in the center but it offers much more contact surface than those pipe-made pills, and the seating surface is thick; it certainly has good thermal transfer properties. This matters, along with receiving a genuine XM-L2.
Thereâs the XM-L2, the XP-L, the XP-G3, brightness bins in the Us and Vs becoming the norm, and youâll still see âXML-T6â ground into the side of these clones.
Those of us in the know, know what to expect, ie, the cheapest crap available that only nominally âworksâ for a limited time. We know not to expect the latest-gen Crees.
Those who are truly clueless and who believe that an 80-100lm light powered by 3 AAAs is â1300lm!!!111oneoneoneâ, arenât about to be fooled by a lookalike LB posing as a Cree.
Hell, all the cheapo lights I bought strictly for use as hosts, have all had at least âLBâ on the stars/discs, if not actual âLatticeBrightâ. Theyâve gotten quite unabashed about it. Honestly, I think you can stop worrying about comparing emitters under a microscope to look for square holes vs round holes and trying to discern LB from Cree. Youâll probably see LB plastered all over it.
Alas, I think Iâm done even with that, because the hosts arenât as nice as they used to be. Never ever got plastic reflectors âtil very recently in some really trashy C8 clones. Theyâre okay for unstressed 1A XP-E2s and âbeadâ type 3W LEDs, but thatâs it. The included switch probably wouldnât even handle 1A for very long, let alone 2A or 3A.
Its only on the sides. But it is not bad with a thermal paste I have used it on my bike for hours on end with 2.0-3.0A with no problems, on a laptop pull and XPL DD.
Yestedray I swapped a Nichia 219b 4000k in it. It has lower pull ~2.6A on a 4.2V battery. The light is amazing. I really cant wait for the high power 90+cri emitters to hit the shelves.