D.I.Y. Illuminated tailcap

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

I forgot, which light is this going into? I always struggled with grounding at the tailcaps on my Convoy S2’s. The setup makes the switch retaining ring sit too low and there battery tube won’t make good contact. I usually end up building up the switch board thickness with some solder on the grounding ring. Not a good long term solution but it works.

It’s a rigid industry flashlight and looks like the older C8’s

I found mine. It was an earlier version.

Gotcha. I thought I remembered someone else running into a similar problem before. Man, what a bugger to pin down!

This is my first post here, so I welcome everyone. My name is Adrian.
I’d like to add this switch to my s2 +. I added a bleeder to the driver, but it still does not work as it should. After switching off and on again, the mode changes to the next one. I’ve tried a bleeder 10k, 4k7, 1k, 750R, 680R, 470R, 240R and even 68R, but it still does not work. I am a beginner, so please be understanding and make suggestions.

What color leds do you using and what resistor values did you placed in the tailcap before them?

You need to wait about 5 seconds before turn off to memorize the last mode

Welcome to BLF Leviatan!

When contact is broken upon a switch (half)press, normally the driver measures the time before contact is resumed, if that is quick enough it interprets it as a switch to the next mode, if it is longer it interprets it as a switch-off. That timing is often influenced by the lighted switch assembly, and can be so off that even a long switch-off is still seen as a mode-change.
I have had drivers that I never got to work with lighted switches, I remember having trouble with 105C-type of drivers, but can’t remember how bad it was.

Being somewhat of a noob myself, is connecting the bleeder resistor between the spring (battery plus) and the star the same as connecting it to the ground (the flashlight body)? I thought the stars are used to change driver functions and perhaps that’s not connecting it to ground.

Leviatan, have to tried soldering the resistor between the spring and the outer ring (or you could solder it to the middle pin of 1 of those 7135s)?

Star #1 is directly connected to the grounding ring, it actually can’t be used for changing settings (whereas stars 2, 3, & 4 can be in your typical star firmware). That placement is exactly how I do all my 105c drivers.

This is the reason why drivers like Bistro HD OTSM were developed, the bleeder does not mess up the off timing as the MCU is powered on while the switch is half pressed

OTSM driver can be used with MOSFET or without, depending which mode group you use, but strobes use the FET

So if you use it with FET upgrading to a DTP LED board is nessesary if you put high drain cells in the light

There are two blue leds. 360R for each.

I can wait even 2 hours, but still mode is changed.