The entire light is excellent. Apart from UI, one of the things I enjoy every time is picking up the light and without looking at it finding the button via the raised section left and right of the button. Once the button is found quickly, pressing it gives such a nice tactile feel and feedback. So before you’re dealing with UI, the experience is already really nice.
I couldn’t agree more! The whole light oozes quality! It’s probably the best light to own, regardless of price. The only thing that I would change is the tint options, but that’s easy enough to do yourself.
Mtn is not selling the bare driver. However, Mtn HAS added the D4 firmware as an option to their line of FET+1 drivers in various sizes. The drivers with the D4 firmware are available now.
The driver is substantially identical in design to the mtn-ddm series with an attiny85. The packaging is slightly different, but that shouldn’t matter in most cases.
I didn’t mean you’ll never need another light. Quite the opposite, different needs call for different lights. But having used this UI, I know I will not enjoy about any light available.
The bar has been raised. Other manufacturers need time to catch up. I surely hope they do it soon.
The way I see it is not that you have a lux meter and a window and a doggie. The doggie is your cousin’s who lives 20 km away.
Anyway it may still be better than the average.
Though I mentioned it before, measuring directly would be another improvement.
However….I see in the simulator that you don’t model body temperature explicitly. I have not looked at D4 sources, so it may be different. Directly, this is the value that you measure during calibration. And this is the temperature that you’d like to limit; not LED temperature really. Is there some accuracy to be gained by adding another latency parameter?
I asked a while ago to clarify which XP-L HI bin did you use in the test. Could you clarify?
I used whatever bin(s) Hank sent. It has a cool tint, so probably the 1A option. However, both XP-L HI and XP-G2 test units were thrown together from spare parts which seemed unfit for customer use, so it’s possible the bins may not match any of the ones he sells.
The simulator is nowhere near an accurate physical model; it’s a quick approximation. It sounds like some other recent projects (BLF GT, maybe FW3A) used some sort of fancy CAD simulator for thermal modeling, but I don’t have anything like that. My entire development and testing setup is pretty ghetto — a DMM, a power supply, an “integrating milk carton”, and a few decapitated lights with their brains hanging out.
That’s what I do when I put it in my coat pocket as well. However because of this, the D4 falls in a specific category of EDC lights; one that does require attention.
Pretty cool indeed. Reminds me of Apple II playing some mono tonal Bach back then …through a one bit DAC - the speaker plugged right into the digital out i’m guessing. I had a bit of fun with machine code experimenting with polyphony on that crude audio interface. There is a whole culture of one bit sound audio in fact. You can even produce speech phonemes and synthetic voices.
That would make quite a fun Easter egg on a flashlight. Especially if you can upload or record different audio bits. :partying_face: