D.I.Y. Illuminated tailcap

While they can be more convenient, you don’t need a special bottom board. Just solder the leads from your top board onto your switch PCB.

You’ll need to identify the polarity of your switch board. Put your DMM in continuity check mode and make sure the switch is in the “off” position (no continuity when touching each side of the switch). Now put one lead on the spring and see which leg of the switch it goes to - this is the negative leg of your switch. Solder the negative lead from your LED board to that leg of the switch, then hook up the positive lead.

As far as bleeder resistors, I just bought a just pack of SMD resistors (from ebay? banggood?). For most of my setups, a 680 or 750 ohm bleeder has worked out just fine. Regarding placement of the bleeder, just let us know what driver you’re using and we’ll take a stab at where to put it. It needs to go from positive to ground, but that varies from driver to driver.

Thank u for the reply, im using a DD MTNElectronics driver in a convoy C8 and Eagle eye x6 hosts,once i do a few i might ass one to my L6

Here’s what I do (see bleeder at left-center). Spring side, scrape a little solder mask off of the grounding area that comes toward the center of the board. Solder the bleeder from the base of the spring to the area of the scraped-away solder mask.

click for a larger view

Thanks I’ll be finding a pack of different bleeding resistors

Can anyone give me some tips lol I bought this tailcap mod with the LEDs soldered to the board and my switch is working to turn the light on in high mode only but the LEDs are not lightning up

Is there anyway to test the board to see if the LEDs are at least working ?

Yup, hook up a battery (li-ion) to it. Mind your polarity

Tailcop mod cant work without a bleeder from batt+ to flaslight body

I have a bleeder resistor (750), and on the board it has 3x123 resistors,

im building another driver and was wondering does anyone have a picture like on post #1635 but on the purple MTN-17DD board ? where i could cut a trace or another location for the bleeder

Got a link to which driver you’re talking about? I don’t know (/can’t tell) what the purple driver is. Essentially, with any driver you’re looking for a convenient place to bridge + and - with a resistor.

just like this but does not have the zener pads
http://www.mtnelectronics.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=25_122&product_id=272

According to the image, the spring side has the same solder mask layout. Bleeder could be placed in the same position as pictured in post #1635.

Well, I just encountered my first problematic boards from OSH Park. I ordered 9 of Rev 5.3 Top boards (of which this is probably my 3rd or 4th order) and 3 of them have channel 1 and 2 accidentally bridged. I tracked it down to here:

It looks the trace around the through-hole encroached onto the trace sneaking just outside of it. Of course I found this after reflowing all of the LEDs (of two colors) onto the board. Luckily I was able to carefully score the trace and separate the channels. The remaining two boards have been tagged and I’ll just use them for single-color tailcaps.

That said… I’m sure this is pretty isolated, but could the design be tweaked slightly to try and avoid this? It looks like a couple of those through-holes are pretty close to other traces. (as I write this, I see that PD has been gone for almost 2 weeks… I hope all is well!)

PD is a less frequent visitor nowadays. But thusfar he has been around every now and then :slight_smile:

I gave up on mine lol i cant get it to work, i used a FET driver and used a 750ohm resistor on the driver like the picture above and the resistors that is on the bottom and still nothing, switch works,leds work, driver and light works ? i give u guys credit for who got yours working

Its most likely a polarity issue. Either your ring board is wired backwards to the switch or your little LEDs are sitting backwards on their pads. Did you test the ring board outside of the light? Like this…

…or mounted to the switch, like this…

Just make sure the switch is “off” (open) before doing this or you’ll be creating a helluva short across either your cell or your power supply.

Yes emarkd mine looks just like that, i put my test leads to the bottom spring and click the switch and they come on and off, But once its in the tail cap and all hooked up they do not power on and my driver does some weird mode changes and dims the led ?

im using a one 751 resistor on the driver from ground to the spring and 3 resistors on the bottom (123)

so i tried it again and again everything tested out to be working when i turn the switch on and off, installed it into the light and it comes on automatically and when i click the switch it gets brighter and click off it goes lower but stays on ?

I hope you can figure this out Lights-Out. I’d suggest using a lower bleeder resistor value (I had to go as low as 220 ohms to get mine to work), but it seems something else is causing your problem.

BTW, I see that the Convoy store now stocks the lighted switch pack mentioned above in post #1619: lighted switch for convoy flashlight.

You sure its not shorting to the body of the light somehow? There’s solder joints on the top of the ring board that could be touching inside the tailcap, plus if you’re wiring yours like mine - soldering to the switch tabs - it would be easy to get a bit sloppy with that and have them extend outside the confines of the board itself, where they could maybe touch the sides of the light. I’d try insulating everything, wrap it all in kapton or something, and see if that fixes it.

i got it to work but it is loosing connection at the spring so im guessing the switch board is bad ? anyone know where i can order a few i think its 20mm