Besides the driver swap, an important consideration is whether you’re working on a early version 1 or a later version 2 MF01.
Version 1 has 6 wires going to the leds and uses 6 volts.
Version 2 has 2 wires going to the leds and uses 18 volts.
If it’s version 2 you will have to cut traces on the mcpcb and add some wires to get it to accept 6v. This extra work for version 2 has to be factored in.
There is only one place selling them, IMR Batteries in Houston, and they are $18 each. Shipping was $11 for 2 of them according to DBCUSTOM. So not cheap, at least for right now.
That's a ton of power from even a single cell. May have to wait until next week and I am not seeing a button top so some solder blobs and these should prove to be trying to find somewhere to get my hands on a few dozen.
His FET driver is cheaper and higher power than his buck version. But I chose the buck version because I wanted to be able to maintain the lumens even on non full batteries.
Since I don’t configure the UI, the controls feels the same to me. I like it simple ramping like that.
Led board = mcpcb?
3S = the mcpcb is 3S6P so it needs 9 volts?
So the buck driver is 12v to 9v?
I thought that buck driver was limited to 6A at 12v or 9A at 9v. You are getting 13.5A to the emitters at about 11 actual volts?
Okay, I had to refresh my memory and work this out.
The MF01 v1 had 3 groups of 2S3P = 6v with 3 built in drivers, one for each group of 6 leds. Used 6 wires to mcpcb.
The v2 was 6S3P where all 18 emitters were wired together and needed 18v. Used 2 wires to mcpcb.
So what you did was convert the 6S3P to 3S6P which needs 9 volts and uses 2 wires to mcpcb? Correct?
This method requires less changes on the mcpcb?
You don’t get a big boost in output, but maybe you go from 12k to 14k lumen (xpg3) and it’s consistent for a long time until it drops out of regulation. So it’s not a big upgrade, it’s just more reliable and has a better UI.
The driver regulates output over the whole battery capacity pretty constant
I found recently a better p-channel MOSFET, which has less conducting and less switching losses, so I could increase the current a bit
But that FET has another footprint so new board would need to be made