FW3A, a TLF/BLF EDC flashlight - SST-20 available, coupon codes public

Please add me for one! :slight_smile:

P.S.: The light looks great!

Agreed, quite different. Yet more questions than answers. Again.

Guessing that is only TK’s proto2. It seems we are now up to at least 3 , or even 4, and so it still seems to keep on evolving, at least in some people’s dreams.

Yeah but that wasn’t all i wrote:

So it seems the warmest tint is somewhere in the middle of the range (from very low to very high).

Okay, i’ll look for that among the esoteric graphs i’m not initiated for. :wink: :smiley:

Gimp rocks. :+1:

On my list of things to learn :slight_smile:

GIMP is very powerful, but I couldn't figure it out.

I use IrfanView for my modest image editing needs.

Photoshop is a lot easier. If you actually want to get things done, and are prepared to pay, or otherwise, obtain it.

Irfan View does the basic jobs and is lightweight. But Faststone Image viewer is far more powerful (basically a clone of ACDSee, my mainstay, and worth the money)

I like Photoshop.

I haven't learned many tricks to use it, but it is more intuitive than GIMP.

We seem to be drifting off again, how did that happen :wink:

Slow news day ?

Not complaining.

One of my favorite things about BLF is that being off-topic is usually not a problem.

Drifting off is at least half the fun here. And if you pay attention sometimes you learn something interesting


Just for the records:
The cut away is from prototype #0
Changes I know:

- tapered design

- moved O-ring(s)

  • some diameter increase

Affinity Photo is quite good for non pro photoshop users.

- one time ca. 55€ instead of a subscription

- nearly all tools the same

  • similar workflow

Reviews are on YouTube

Edit: Some reviews about early beta version

I’ve never heard of Affinity Photo. But I just looked it up and it does seem nice. I’ve been a GIMP user for years. I’ve never used Photoshop. I’m not anything like a professional user, but I have learned how to do some moderately advanced things with GIMP. Photoshop and Affinity Photo still have quite a few very advanced features that Gimp lacks.

I’ve spent time with a bunch of image editors, and have been using GIMP and Photoshop since the 1990s. I even made my own paint program / image editor once, designed mostly around demoscene effects. But I find GIMP suits me best, and is the most intuitive for me. Part of it is because it’s trivially easy to assign arbitrary keyboard shortcuts, part is because it lets my window manager do its job instead of trying to manage everything itself in a single window, and part is just that it has the types of tools I want.

In the past, Photoshop was a lot better if you needed color spaces other than greyscale or RGB, but GIMP recently overhauled its engine to fix that sort of issue. It always had a wider and more advanced variety of image-processing tools, often getting brand new stuff from SIGGRAPH long before other programs, but its core architecture has also gotten a lot more mature over time.

I wouldn’t use either one for diagrams or for painting though. There are better tools for those tasks, like Inkscape for diagrams and Krita for painting. GIMP is mostly designed for photo editing.

It’s hard to go wrong with any decent image editor though. There is no shortage of genuinely good imaging software these days.

About the FW3A though… something I’ve been pondering is whether to try to fit in a factory reset function somewhere.

This would reset everything to defaults except the thermal sensor calibration. For that, it would act as if the user went through thermal config mode and calibrated it to 21 C. Maybe that’s not the exact temperature of everyone’s rooms, but it should be a lot closer than an uncalibrated attiny85.

Normally I’d put it on “hold e-switch while connecting power, then continue to hold for a few seconds”. However, the FW3A can’t do that because the switch doesn’t get physically connected until after power.

So maybe it could be on some other action which is hard to do by accident. Maybe 10 clicks from off and hold the 10th?

If it fits, the overall UI for it would be:

  • Loosen the tube, hold the e-switch, then tighten the tube while still holding the switch. (or click 10 times and hold the 10th press)
  • Starting at a low level, the light flashes an increasingly intense warning stutter.
  • Let go to cancel the reset, or otherwise keep holding.
  • After ~5 seconds, the light makes a bright flash, resets everything to defaults, then smoothly fades back to off.

At least, that’s how the “self destruct mode” works on the lightsaber UI I made. It probably doesn’t need to be as fancy in a flashlight. In particular, it probably shouldn’t get very bright because that could affect the temperature calibration. Regardless though, I’ve been pondering whether it should be included.

The Anduril I flashed onto my D4 goes into a lock on if you click 10 plus clicks from on. I would consider this a good thing, must power cycle to exit.

I don’t see myself using a factory reset, but it might be good for some.

I think that was a big in an older version where too long click sequences just lock up the whole light.

That should be fixed by now

Since then, I completely rewrote the button input handling system. It’s now quite a bit smaller and also lacks bugs like the one you noted.

I still have a couple other bugs to hunt down, but they only affect lights with aux LEDs, so it’s not relevant for the FW3A. The other bugs are also incredibly rare, to the point that I can’t even make them happen on purpose, so it may take a while to confirm any fixes.

In any case, there is no more lock-up after long click sequences.

Perhaps since Lumintop only intended to test anodizing, they didn’t bother cutting actual threads? That’s why the tubes look different and why the parts couldn’t be threaded together.