DQG Tiny 4

I received my DQG Tiny 4. Beautiful light. I love it! :heart_eyes: The anodizing is perfect. It’s a little lighter grey and slightly less shiny than the anodizing on my Tiny 3s.

I really like it. It addressed a number of my main concerns about the Tiny 3:

  • The flush rubber button is much less likely to accidentally turn on in the pocket than the protruding metal button of the Tiny 3.
  • The designers added a shortcut to turbo from off (click and hold).

That said, like any light there are still areas that can be improved:

  • The tiny rubber button is completely flush with the body and compared to other side switch lights it is relatively hard to find by feel. My modded Tiny 3s with finishing washers around the button are much easier to find by touch and still well protected from accidental activation. Suggested solution: Add a raised ring around the button to make the button easier to find… Also, the metal button of the Tiny 3 surrounded by a chrome plated finishing washer looks far classier than the rubber button.
  • Without the clip installed the light has no anti-roll device. It can easily roll off a table if laid on its side. Suggested solution: same as above. The raised ring also serves as an effective anti-roll device.
  • The light doesn’t get that hot on Turbo. Suggested solution: increase turbo timer duration from 1 minute to 2 minutes.
  • The tailcap on the Tiny 3 and 4 are interchangeable. However, in the Tiny 4 they removed the knurling and replaced it with a raised band with sparsely spaced ridges. This is purely a stylistic preference, but personally I prefer the Tiny 3’s knurled tailcap as it gives better grip.

I haven’t yet opened mine up, but from other reviewers it looks like they also added a very thin heatsink layer on top of the driver. I’m not sure how effective this will be given that the top of the driver has various SMD devices on it, but it is still probably better than nothing (the DQG3 had basically no heatsinking).

The switch internals also look a little different. The Tiny 3 had a microswitch pressed or glued into the side of the head with two tiny wires connecting it to the driver. the Tiny 4’s switch appears to be mounted directly to the driver.

This is a beautiful light right out of the box even without modding. I own multiple DQG 18650 lights, including the Tiny 1, 3 and now 4. This is the first one that I would consider carrying unmodded …. very rare for me since I usually only carry modded lights. This light is just that good. Unmodded I like this light even more than my Zebralight SC62w … a light that costs over 3x as much.

I haven’t yet decided whether I will try to mod my Tiny 4. I already have two modded Tiny 3s and the exterior of the Tiny 4 is very similar. If I mod this light into a triple, the internal heatsink layer probably wouldn’t help me since I’d want to add my own copper heatsink.

As these lights use a single board that contains both the driver and LED it probably isn’t possible to mod them with a different single emitter and driver due to lack of space. Fortunately, it is possible to mod them into triples as Carclo triple TIR optics are considerably shorter than the stock single-emitter TIR optic.

That said, in case I do decide to mod it I do have a 20mm e-switch FET driver from RMM standing by. I expect it should fit even if I need to file the edges slightly.

I confirm that separating the head from the body is much easier in the DQG Tiny 4. I was able to unscrew it using just my hands with no preheating. This light should be easier to mod than the Tiny 3.

Interested. Anyone has a nice coupon code and link to share?

Edit: never mind. I found the code from m4d m4x thread.

Hey guys,

I just got one in today, a grey one (form Gearbest).
Good to see the PCB can be removed with some heat, because there are (indeed) some design issues that should be solved.
I love the tiny size though, it’s, well, it’s really tiny. :stuck_out_tongue:
The heat management is a joke though, and the switch is just waiting to break from the PCB by the looks of it.
I hope to find a satisfactory way to improve things and put a Nichia 219C in it, but that looks to be a real challenge.

Well, that didn’t go quite as planned:

Oops…

In with new driver and triple mcpcb :wink:

I’ll try to repair it first.
Then take the XM-L2 off and see where we’ll go with this POS.
…i mean DQG.

So, i guess this is one of my lucky days…
Just dropped a three legged black thingy on the floor and now it’s apparently gone to another dimension…
I don’t even have carpet here, but it’s gone…

i wish there was a better switch solution too but i can;t think of one

mine failed electrically, and broke off the pc board - at the same time!

wle

I HAVE FOUND IT !!

Yesssssss !!!

Soooo tiny….

Now back to reassembling the PCB…

Yeah that sucks…
Mine came off too eventually, but i’m gonna fix it with grey epoxy.
No chance it will come off again.

It’s a shame this light is so poorly thought out regarding the PCB.

Well, all the parts are back in place again.
Quick test showed it works, but not sure about the modes yet. (fumbling with tweezers as a switch)
I put the switch back on too with a bit more solder and a blob of grey epoxy.
Will be able to test in a few hours.
I’ll put up a pic of the result and how i secured the switch.

And if all is well, i’ll take off the XM-L2 and see if what can be done about the non existent heat management.

That went faster than expected, so here is the picture:

And it works as it should too. :slight_smile:

Grey epoxy blob behind the switch.
I put some in between switch and PCB as well.

And now hope to find a proper solution for the total lack of heat management.

lot of work!

curious what you can do about the heat problem, that is the reason it;s tiny after all…

if you get the heat out, then the outside will get hot(ter).

mine gets pretty warm just on high, not even turbo

wle

It took a while, yes…
Good Lord those SMD parts are tiny… :confounded:

Found another design flaw that really helps breaking the switch off the PCB too.
I will show you later.

My guess is they had better plans but it turned out to be too expensive to produce.
Either that or it’s just a bad design.
Not sure what to do yet, but i have some ideas.
Like a copper ring on top of the LED in contact with the shelf, and making the + pole a disc with a seal pad between it and the brass ring that now has the foam rubber on it.
Then a thermally isolated iron battery contact, but maybe that’s not necessary.
It’s a challenge…

That’s the idea of a thermal path, isn’t it?
Like this the heat is only transferred to the battery top and nowhere else.

Imagine how hot the LED will get… :person_facepalming:

Welcome to modding 101.

Some of these lights it seems like they spent more time designing mod defeats than actually worrying about the light. That emitter on board stuff is ridiculous, I don’t know why they haven’t figured that out yet.

Good luck! :slight_smile:

It could have worked with a copper or even aluminium board, but it’s just regular epoxied fiberglass (or whatever PCBs are made of normally).
I can hardly imagine this was the original plan.

DQG tends to try to make the smallest possible light for a given format. They can shave off several mm by putting the emitter and driver on the same board instead of using a separate star. Zebralights are built the same way.

Unfortunately, this does make them much more difficult to mod.

Hmmm…. It seems the easiest way to solve cooling problems is making it a triple…
Make that R010 resistor a direct bridge for a bit more turbo and just put one of my Kaidomain 219C triples in there (when they arrive) and forget about solving impossible things…

direct bridge give You ~2.3A at Turbo
FET also has a resistance