I don’t know what to think. Is it April fool’s?
No, it’s not.
I’m not kidding. I have been speaking with Sofirn, and that is what they said:
Yes, Q8 will have a update version, that we will sell it in our store, with extend battery bube and XPL-HI emitter
The reason it led up to this was because I was asking if they could sell the BLF Q8 battery tube and tailcap separately.
Initially, they misunderstood what I said and thought I was speaking about the new BLF Q8 they were building. That is when I discovered about the new BLF Q8, which led to knowing that it would come with XPL HIs, an extended battery tube, and a modified driver.
Wow… can’t wait to see this one!
Yep.
With that, it would be extremely easy to swap the LEDs out, and with 8 cells and sufficient low resistance contacts, swap them for XHP50.2s, and get 15k+ lumens.
That would not be very sustainable though.
This is uhh… interesting.
This gets back to that Sofirn/Thorfire confusion, (Sofirn has taken over the project now?) but aside from that I look forward to the next gen Q8. Though I’m a bit confused with the configuration. XPL-HI is 3v right? How does 2s work? I’m super newb.
Also I gotta say maybe I’d mount the above pictured “Uber Q16” to my truck for a light cannon but I don’t know how to otherwise use it. I certainly couldn’t carry it on my nightly walk…
(Edit: it suddenly occurs to me I’d better check the Q8 mod thread which I’ve never done. There may be info there I’m unaware of)
Djozz below. That’s nuts! I guess it would be a (bad) way to carry a bunch of cells. Wait, I know! New Olympic sport. Night time pole vault!
This version will have the normal 3V driver, not be 4P2S but 8P, and will have battery carriers.
(You can just keep on extending if you like, build a 64P Q8 :party: )
Can’t wait for this!
I wonder at who needs these kinds of runtimes. My Q8 doesn’t drop under 4V after an hour use walking and messing with turbo constantly.
With 8 cells it might be pretty useful to light up an entire basketball court for night games.
I agree that this extension with added parallel batteries is not the most innovative add-on for the Q8 (and it was not an initiative of the Q8 team), but from their perspective this upgrade makes sense as it is easy and not expensive to make and sell, it does add runtime which will appeal to quite some people (the Q8 has a sustainable output of about 2000 lumen, at which output it currently has ~2 hours of runtime, to light your basketball court 
wanting 4 hours is not exorbitant), and best it fits all the thousands of existing Q8’s.
This long body tube is quite unexpected… It sorts of voids the whole compact soda can concept.
I would suggest a screw in USB charging extension between the head and tube… That would only add about 10-15mm to the length and would make the Q8 easier to gift to non flashaolics.
Have you ever charged 20000+ mAh powerbank with usb 2.0?
If they make this, maybe also upgrade the driver to the latest Anduril for some additional features?
They are at least in contact with TomE, so a Narsil upgrade is likely, not sure about Anduril…
Thanks for the info, BlueswordM and djozz.
I don’t see much meaning in a 8P setup for this light. For more runtime it’s easier to carry 4 additional cells separately than their weight and the tubes weight all the time in your hand.
But if the cell configuration can be changed to 2S4P without too much work, I would rather buy this light as a modding host for 6V LEDs for a proper price.
Shouldn’t it be doable with QuickCharge over night?
Quickcharge will cost too much. Was discussed before.
Anyway, for the 4 cell version it’s usually not more than 12000 mAh capacity, and that’s not too much for USB-charging over night, and the cells won’t be completely empty everytime.
What I have seen how the battery carriers are constructed, with some cutting traces and adding wires you should be able to make them 2S4P. Then a 2S driver can be used that has the same battery connection side as the stock Q8. A more neat solution is designing new contact boards for the battery carriers (and upload on Oshpark for everyone to use ) to get this done.