(BLF) Sofirn Q8 V1.5: The XPL HI monster, DIY parts + Extended 8x18650 tubes GB Interest List

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 :slight_smile: 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 :slight_smile: ) to get this done.

Sounds good, I wouldn’t mind to design the new carrier boards.
I haven’t followed the modding discussions for a while, is a MCPCB for XHP 50/70 available meanwhile?

Led4power has in stock mcpcbs for Q8 , 4040 and 5050 footprints :wink:

https://led4power.com/product/l4p-blf-q8-40405050-38mm-dtp-direct-thermal-path-copper-mcpcb/

Great, thanks!

One concern here, if all 8 cells are run down to minimum voltage, then some bright spark decides instead of swapping them all out (since he only has a 4 bay charger), he will charge one carrier load and insert it, wouldn’t the resulting current from 4x30Q fully charged to 4x30Q fully discharged be rather like welding? There must be some sort of protection against that built in right?

With the proliferation of 4 bay chargers I suspect that charge imbalance would be quite a common problem. One easy way to encounter this would be to run a “normal” test on your cells in a Lii500, and forget that when END is flashing it doesn’t mean the cells are fully charged. Do that once on an 8 cell recharge with this setup and you now have one fully charged set and one set at a random voltage, without being aware. Happens easily.

XPL-HI, you say… :heart_eyes:

This could happen in any parallel setup, it’s not a specific problem of the light discussed here.
Btw. with a 4P2S setup it would be even worse, since the carrier with the depleted cells gets reversed voltage.