Instead of making the countersinks deeper for the focusing screws I decided to just flatten a second 20mm noctigon and use it as a shim between the LED MCPCB and the waterblock.
This will increase the height from 1.65 to ~3.3mm, much easier than making the countersinks deeper and adding washers to the short springs.
Also, in the future if I ever do put a CFT90 in it, that LED has a 3.38mm thick MCPCB so the focus distance will be perfect.
I have not noticed any significant decrease in performance by adding the second copper MCPCB, probably due to the liquid metal and large area not being a bottleneck.
Tonight I will be doing some tests with the oslon black flat installed at 6 amps, we will see how much the output drops over time and maybe some beamshots
No time for lux measurements yet, need to find a good 150m long straight stretch.
That sounds like a lot cleaner solution to the short screw/focus issue. How nice that the CST-90 will end up at just the right place. looking forward to more shots.
With the pump overheating, why don’t you use shorter tubing? For such a small and low power emitter it is an overkill. Lowering its resistance would relieve the stress on the poor pump. Or fabbing a metal mount that would act as a heatsink /passive cooling. You have lots of metal that could disperse the heat. Another possible solution could be using the same tubing wrapped around the motor to cool down the pump as well. Just my thoughts.
Thank you! More beam shots hopefully coming tonight!
Thanks!
You’re right, in fact for the synios LEDs I could probably get away with using just two heatpipes or simply attaching the LED directly to the aluminum spider without any additional cooling.
However, I do want to have the flexibility of using a black flat or possibly the CFT90 in the future, and those 100% need the overkill cooling in order to not overheat.
I’m afraid to kink the tubing by wrapping it so tightly around the motor, there are special motor cooling coils for RC boats I could use if I wanted but the easiest solution is to just heatsink the pump to the aluminum body using a half-circle cut into an aluminum block, which I just machined today
Lightbringer actually suggested I put multiple tubing runs in parallel for reduced flow restriction with the same amount of cooling, maybe in a future prototype I can do that.
For now I need to keep things simple, there is almost no room left inside
Since the pump still has a high flow rate even with all the tubing, I think I will be fine simply adding a thermal path from the pump to the body.
The 3mm thick acrylic lens from flashlightlens.com is perfect, and is well secured with 6 screws around the front.
It looks like this in person too, almost invisible when it is on the flashlight.
BEAMSHOTS!
This time I swapped the LED out to a black flat, making it much easier to focus into a spot, although it is still not perfectly focused for max lux.
The distance to the trees is 400m.
No pics of this, but compared to the old OptoFire it has a noticeably brighter spot, while also being much larger.
The brightness of the beam is fairly similar, however the SyniosBeam has a much thicker beam due to the reflector diameter.
Would you say the hotspot on the trees is maybe about 8’ to 10’ in diameter? It looks very intense! But this is the Black Flat, right? So not able to compare to last nights shots. I don’t remember Lumens Specs for the both of them?
This is the black flat yes.
Black Flat: ~900lm, ~260cd/mm^2 (today)
Synios DMLN: ~200lm, ~310cd/mm^2 (last night)
Synios DMLQ: ~400lm, ~310cd/mm^2
CFT90: ~5000lm, ~200cd/mm^2 (30A)
Amazing work !
I can’t wait for the final measurement after the focus tuning :sunglasses:
Is there any spill ? Or does the recoil configuration make a pencil beam only ?
Yes it is beam only, like an aspheric thrower.
No chromatic aberration though, so spot is all evenly coloured.
Also the spot is a round shape due to the large difference in angles that the reflector picks up light at, no square die projection.
Those flashlightlens lenses are that clear I’ve had people putting fingerprints all over them as they dont believe it has a lens on it at all. :person_facepalming:
A lower voltage would reduce the heat, but also the flow rate.
Now that I added a heat path to the body it isn’t heating up
I might join the scratch build contest, however it took a year to plan and design this light, and there are still small things going wrong, so I doubt I would do a project this complex for a scratch build contest.
I bought a tiny tripod for it, so I can point it at different angles easily:
Well the biggest difference is it has no spill, also the corona is much less pronounced, so the transition from spot to darkness is a lot faster as you can see in the pic.
The spot is not perfectly round though, not sure if it is my focusing or just the reflector’s precision.
I will need to do further tests with the synios LEDs.
My first test from two days ago didn’t look like higher intensity than the OptoFire but it was definitely not well focused.
First I want to measure the black flat though.
Wooooaaaah! I missed this thread for weeks and was drawn in again by the mention of beamshots. This is fantastic work Enderman! A much cleaner build than the Optofire, and a bigger/further/better beam of course! Very very nice, I’m looking forward to more beamshots and numbers.