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?
BTW, part of the difference between Test 3 and Test 4 was a cheap trick: The attiny85v has a thermal sensor and 10-bit ADC. So, I made it give me about 11 or 12 bits of precision. 
(it’s over-sampling and using noise to slightly increase the resolution… which may sound silly, but it improved the results so I’m keeping it that way)
Just got my D4 (Nichia) in today. Here’s a size comparison with the ZL SC600w MKIII HI.
I measured 20.40a at the tail with vtc6…this thing is a hot rod!
Thanks for the review and work on the F/W TK!
Seems like an awesome light that will blow the S41/E14 out of the water.
Just hope it will ship with 90+ CRI 5000K 219C as an option.
Thanks! I was wondering how many amps it pulled… I was guessing about 15A, so it’s even higher than expected. That works out to like 75W. I added this info to the review, since I don’t have tools to measure that many amps.
^ A 75W incandescent bulb is actually pretty bright… Dang… :smiling_imp:
A german online-shop lists them for a reasonable price. Do you want me to send you two pieces ?
The head of the light isn’t safe to handle after 10 seconds. I think I’ll use GA cells instead to get more runtime/less heat.
Someone should make a light like this with a plastic or rubber cage round the head. The cage should be sufficient to prevent the user’s fingers from directly contacting the metal in the head, while having slits to allow heat to escape.
Getting too hot to touch in 10 seconds sounds a lot like my modded DQG Tiny III 18650 with FET driver. It became such a problem that I made an external finned aluminum heatsink. Even that didn’t solve the problem, but then I painted the heatsink with paint and super-glue and installed a new button cover made out of Sugru. The light still gets too hot to touch, but now takes more like a minute to get there instead of 10 seconds. The finish on the light looks awful though.
Here’s a picture with the 18350 tube. It’s almost the same size as the 4sevens mini turbo mkii!
Measured it with Aspire 18350 and it pulled 13.7A. Impressive.
Thank you TK for your nice and useful review! :+1: I like the green one.
The road has led you to an interesting place — welcome to BLF!
It’s not often that anyone spends their first post on one of my threads.
After a couple minor tweaks, I tried a runtime test on turbo with a full 25R cell until LVP kicked in.
I had the thermal limit set to 45 C (ish) and pointed a fan at it the whole time. Output stayed fairly close to a stable level after the initial peak, but it actually got slightly brighter over time overall. I suspect this might be due to the cell voltage getting closer to the emitter Vf, so there may have been less heat. Toward the end it also becomes very clear that the thermal regulation is fighting against the typical direct-drive sag curve.
So… aside from being a little bumpy, thermal regulation seems to be working pretty well.
