I mentioned this elsewhere recently, but it all goes well with the BLF Lantern, I could see a future flashlight mixing emitters on a board with separate channels for emitters for tint-ramping purposes. Form factor could be a D4 style light where each emitter has its own optic, or Iād be curious if a closely clustered quad like Clemence does with E21Aās could share the same floody optic for different color temperature emitters.
Looks the same as a normal D4, but 4500K tint. The output from the different emitter overlaps completely and you just see one beam with the new mixed tint. You canāt really even see mixed emitters were used unless you turn it on moonlight and look at the emitters or shine it a wall or piece of paper a few inches away on very low power.
Iām interested in one. with 5000ish tint.(4500/5500)
Preferably SST 20.
Not interested in throw or spread.
itās just a beautiful LOOKING light and Iāll have one just to have it in my hand.
Iāve got a zillion throwers and spreaders now.
Just looking for the extra nice ones nowadays.
Which this one definitely is. I hate the square ones. (D1/D4 etc)
At some point once the multi-button UIs and drivers are done Iām sure varied emitter tint lights with tint ramping will be a thing. Its already a reality with the Zanflare T1 (despite the obvious differences there), I dont see any reason it couldnāt be done in a regular flashlight other than some possible weird beam profile.
Tint ramping already works in the BLF Lantern project. The code was written three months ago, and itās pretty much just waiting on hardware details to get finalized.
This should also work for flashlight-style lights with multiple emitters, but itāll either be limited to one power channel per tint like the lantern (so the lowest levels will be very coarse) or itāll need a bigger MCU with more PWM pins.
So itās working, but to make it practical for something like a D4 itāll take more work. That would need a FET+1+FET+1, and the attiny85 doesnāt have enough pins. Also, the tint ramping math gets a little weird when it has multiple power channels per tint. The lantern design is much simpler.
An extra button could help, but itās really not required. Itās pretty difficult to fit more than one button on most compact flashlight designs, so I prefer to fit the feature in on one button instead of two or three.
Tint ramping was a pretty small change in Anduril. All I had to do was create an extra āstateā which resides underneath everything else, catching un-handled button events which fell through upper layers. Then tell it to handle a button sequence nothing else uses, or which almost nothing else usesā¦ and like magic, every mode supports tint ramping.
In this case, it used ā3 clicks but hold the last clickā to change tint, regardless of what mode the light is in. It works in every mode which doesnāt already consume that type of event. So the interface, in general, is:
Click: On/off.
Hold: Change brightness or speed (upward, also reverses).
Click, hold: Change brightness or speed (downward).
Click, click, hold: Change tint (reverses).
It may be a little more complicated with one button than it could be with two buttons, but itās pretty universal across the entire interface so hopefully it wonāt be too hard to remember.
This isnāt used for the FW3A though. So far, itās only for the BLF Lantern. Each FW3A is a single tint, so it has no need for tint ramping.