Oh yeah… :sunglasses:
Okay, the tailswitch sits too deep so it’s a bit hard to press it, and i couldn’t get it out to do something about it…
The anodizing is not the best, and i super-glued the clip to fix it so it won’t scratch it anymore.
But at least it has a clip.
So it’s the smallest AAA zoomie i ever saw, ridiculously cheap, so i got one.
It’s a genuine SKYWOLFEYE :+1:
Yeah, so let’s put an outdated LED in it, to replace the Lettuce Bite fake XP-E !!
And since it’s a zooming thrower, let’s de-dome it !
Because it only has a 11mm aspheric (and not even too bad) plastic lens, it’s better to have an LED die as small as possible.
Sure, the XP-C is a low power LED, maximum recommended / rated current is around 500mA, but this little light only has a tiny driver.
I forgot to take a pic of the driver, sorry…
But it’s one with a 6 legged IC, looks better than i expected for such a cheap light.
It seems to work well too.
1 mode.
The pill was of course hollow, so i put in a copper disc (press fit).
This moves the LED about 1mm forward, so i had to cut some of the bottom ridge (where the head stops at) away to be able to focus zoomed in (head moved forward).
This also means the lens will be closer to the LED when zoomed out, so you have a wider zoom out flood spot beam.
So now you can illuminate a whole wall… … with 1 Watt…
I don’t know, maybe it’s 1.5 Watts.
I had an option for a different lens as you can see, but decided to use the stock lens afterall.
It was quite a challenge to get the dedomed LED on that tiny 8mm MCPCB in there when i decided to shorten the wires by half, without damaging it or getting thermal grease all over it.
And i even got it wrong the first time, because i had the polarity wrong…
You can see that in the 3rd picture… :person_facepalming:
The beamshots i took to show the difference in size of the projected LEDs.
The 11mm lens has the same focal distance as the 18mm SK68 lens.
[edit] no it hasn’t, it has a shorter focal distance than the 18mm SK68 lens. [/edit]
But with the dedomed XP-C the light is focussed in a much tinier spot.
Of course the SK68 clone with XP-E2 is brighter.
Not only because of the better LED, but probably a better driver and the lens simply catches more light because of its much larger diameter / surface area.
This is why i got some small sized lenses with much shorter focal distance, so it would catch more light from the LED.
But it would have made the projection of the LED much larger
The stock lens is quite okay, better than expected.
No ‘donut’ when half zoomed, nice projection of the LED die when zoomed in.
The tint is quite nice too.
I bought “WD” color bin, which is 1D and 2A as we know it now.
I have one more pic:
I actually reviewed that other AAA zoomy in 2014. cheap 1xAAA zoomie (short review)
I think it was $4+ at the time, but in all this SKYWOLFEYE is better for less than half the price.
The XP-C LEDs can be bought on AliExpress.
I paid around $5.75 for 20 pieces.
But maybe CREE still has some super tiny die LEDs, i don’t know the specifics of the XQ-A, but could be interesting.