A dab of glue on the wire helps
Hi Toykeeper. Is this light still in the works and having the kinks worked out or are you just making adjustments on you own personal light.
I see on Mountain Electronics website that he is expecting stock in the next few days.
I would prefer a light that had the kinks worked out.
Would it be best to wait for a revised edition of this light, or is what you received final production?
Thanks in advance. Looks like a real winner of a light!
Just a side note, one of a personal nature or observation… those glow in the dark stickers are ridiculous to put on a surface with that much heat! I have repeatedly fixed lights for people that used them, after they burn and blacken and cause black spots or total destruction of emitters. Just a personal observation of course, a note saying you won’t find any light of mine with paper/plastic on the mcpcb. Also, nobody needs to bother to ask me to fix one with that junk on there, won’t do it anymore. So now that that’s been noted, we now return you to the regularly scheduled program already in progress…
Thank you for the awesome review! Can’t wait for this to go live on Hank’s store.
I have couple of questions.
Is there any chance driver retaining ring will be used on production units? Is the switch pcb easily accessible and is the rubber cover any standard size? I’m thinking it could be easily modified with status LED. And what are those D4 siblings you mentioned (if you can talk about it).
Cheers!
Since the firmware is open-source, any chance of calibrating the temp sensor in the driver specifically for the Emisar in future production runs?
Available in a few days?
Sounds like it’s going production as-is. Still, even as-is, this sounds like a great light. Thinking of buying a Nichia one and a 5D one.
Too bad this light isn’t available stock with high-CRI nichia, XPL2 (unsure if those fit under the optic), or 5A2 XPL HI. On the upside, it looks like swapping the emitters should be easy.
XP-L HI in this light has a square beam pattern. it’s not bad with Nichia but with the dedomed emitters it’s pretty bad. One way to fix that is to use the new mountain electronics’ new quad mcpcb. The board offsets the LEDs and the beam pattern’s much improved over the TPAD/Noctigon boards.
Well… it’s hard to say something without fitting components and power calculation, obviously there wont be too much lumens using boost or buck driver. Yeah, a lack of place is limmiting driver’s opportunities. But comfortable interface and rich functionality that’s what can make a real wow effect.
As for Indigo, everyone can use source code without any restrictions. There’s no licence but author is not against, in simple words - do what you want 
Test 4 looks like the best regulation, it goes to a steady level fastest. And well done in preventing oscillations!
Is your thermal algorithm specifically working well in this host or would it work just as well (without oscillations) in bigger hosts?
Thanks for the insight Dale and couldn’t agree more, but this not off the shelf glow stickers or store bought cloth tape, plastic or vinyl, it is a multi layer heat resistant sort of tape capable of withstanding heat to 500C or very close to it, Kapton heat range is only about 280C, the luminescent pigments is in between heat shielded materials, and it all can be easily removed, well sort of easily, depends how long it’s been on as the current adhesive seems to harden with time and the heat I think, generally easily removed by tweezers and then a low grade solvent or alcohol and q tip to remove left over adhesive cling, One material is a 1 mil thick polyimide film in disks, Edit: or in sheet form, and is just short of being actual Kapton being it’s short of the polymers used in actual Dupont Kapton tape then with the silicone adhesive application to bond the layers, and one other layer is PTFE with Teflon then with the luminescent pigments I place in between the layers it works fantastic but time consuming to make and expensive so really only barely practical, it does not melt even when testing it with my jewelers torch (Little Smith), also make glow O rings with hybrid silicone tubing and my own mix of pigments, injected, measured and sealed, and that is also heat resistant as well but not to the extent of this tape, yep have melted a few stickers, tapes, cloth in the process of trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, there are some very bad products that will melt almost immediately so people need to really search for heat resistance 80C min. if using glow anything in lights for sure, I couldn’t agree with you more Dale…Thanks
It looks like the driver cavity is about 19.3 mm inner diameter and about 2.5 mm deep. The tiny85 is the tallest component, at about 2.0 mm, which leaves 0.5 mm empty space to the shelf. In theory, Hank could make that 0.4mm or 0.5mm shallower to speed up thermal regulation response, but there might not be enough room for the wires.
I agree the UI can make a huge difference. That’s why I’m excited about the firmware being fully open-source. It can have any UI you want.
Does this mean Indigo is public domain? Usually “no license” defaults to “copyrighted with all rights reserved”, legally. But if the author states that it is released under public domain or CC0, I can include it in the repository.
(note: “public domain” and Creative Commons Zero “CC0” are equivalent)
I suppose I could include it anyway, but it would still need a clear license of some sort. For example, I have DrJones’ luxdrv which is CC-BY-NC-SA… even though the NC (non-commercial) part causes trouble. The NC part means I can’t even look at the code without risk of being sued, because people sometimes sell the stuff I make.
Always wondered what keeps scoundrels in the light industry from just hanging back and watching your fantastic R&D along with many other fantastic advancements that have came from this group then take it and tweak it to their purpose and then use it commercially, seems all they have to do is make some slight tweak and call it their own and register it as such, probably already happens, sort of like watching Manker make such great use out of the driver used in the A6 on, seemed almost every light Manker designed after the A6 and BLF SE X6 & X5 all used those drivers, perhaps some deal was struck way back when,
Nice work TK. :+1:
If I understand correctly, what I have is the first production run. The second batch, I think, will have some firmware updates based on what I’m doing.
It’s pretty nice, but in the first batch you should manage the temperature yourself instead of relying on the built-in thermal protection.
I don’t expect a driver retaining ring. It would make the light longer.
Normally I’d be more upset about the driver glue, but it wasn’t difficult to remove and didn’t really make modding any harder in this case.
The switch PCB is not easily accessible. I haven’t attempted to remove it. However, if you do manage to get it out, the driver already has an unused pad to control an indicator LED. This makes it compatible with Narsil’s indicator features.
If I understand correctly, that’s what I’m doing?
I’m calibrating it for this specific host, but I plan to try it on a SRK and a Convoy triple too… the idea is to update bistro and crescendo with the same algorithm, and maybe Narsil if Tom is okay with that. If things go well, it shouldn’t need much (or any) modification to work in different lights, but that might be overly optimistic. It does at least adjust proportional to the rate of change though, so it will react slower on lights with less power or more thermal mass.
Anyway, I’m not done yet. I hope I can get it to produce a nearly-flat runtime graph for the whole life of the battery, aside from the initial hot peak. It looks promising so far… like, on that last graph, I changed hands to give it a fresh heat sink, and about 15 seconds later it stepped up a bit.
It’ll be interesting to try this underwater, or touch it with ice mid-test.
Oh, also, tiny85 chips don’t use a calibrated sensor. They vary by at least 10 C between individual pieces. So I think I need to convert that thermal toggle function into a thermal calibration function like in bistro.
There are reasons I use a GPLv3 license: The GNU General Public License v3.0 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
Some very skilled lawyers created that license specifically to make sure free software won’t be abused. People can make and sell derivative works, but they can’t just take — they have to give too, by releasing their changes under the same license. That’s the foundation of the whole free software information economy. Share and share alike.
What tape is it? I could use some.
That is interesting TK, thanks, always wondered but should have figured that if I am wondering there are lawyers making sure there is no wondering about it, that is great.
Agro, I make it myself but I don’t sell it, it’s still work in progress but fairly good at where it is at the moment and the O rings I make as well, got real tired of trying to find GITD O rings so made my own and they are a 1000 times better than any store bought just not as easy to work with or convenient, lots of work just to make one ring and then measure for fit and install, easy hour work.
Any chance of selling an optional 18650 body tube with knurling on it?
I like the added grip knurling provides. I’m not a huge fan of completely smooth tubes.
I think it’s nesessary to replace spring to a brass pill. Cutting down the driver’s metal border or even more could help to win a few mm. Also a good idea to drill the hole in the pcd for inductor or make the existed hole wider under the led star in the center specially for inductor (must be something like direct connect with mcpcb) and make the other ones for wires.
The code is far from being perfect, it’s more a toy than a serious develop, as author says. He doesn’t want to licence it, who would have thought but pirates must rejoy Seems that in your country that’s really hard to sell something without following intelectual property laws. I understand… so if there were a licence, that would be the best solution. I may not know all the aspects but you have the source code. Who prevents you from licensing it by yourself? Who cares?