Interesting knockoff that looks nice. Surprised the promo period already ended especially considering the Q8 is still on sale for $45. Nevertheless the slight update over the Q8 with the usb charging is demanded by many but IMO the silicon flappers they use to seal them never, ever work as intended and the IPX7 rating is really IPX6. I’d never purposefully submerge a silicone flapper light. Watched a video of a guy who destroys his Olight X9 testing it’s water resistance in a 1m pool. Flashlight filled with water and I expect the same result from any light with a silicone flapper.
Other than that, it’s a nice light and hopefully a compliment to the Q8
I didn’t get an answer on Facebook yet, though it says the question was seen 3 days ago. So I asked on Amazon. Amazon’s question system is awkward at best for this kind of thing, but maybe it’ll work? If not, I can try some other method.
Yea, searching I can't find anything on the brand name, not yet, but funny this DC7 model was listed back in January so it's been on Amazon for a while.
Ahh, that's cool then. In the upper left I see a board mount, probably for the USB-C connector.
If you got it loose anyways, is it loose enough to pull out and take a pic of the other side? Don't try unless you are comfortable with it - don't want you to risk messing anything up. Ohh, do be carefuly with those screws. They tend to strip easy, usually...
Yeah, I can’t tell either. With the USB port pointing south, it looks like there’s a FET and a 7135 to the west, a 14-leg MCU in the center, and some other 8-leg chip to the east. I can’t tell what the center or east chips are. It looks like the 14-leg chip is probably in control though, since it has traces going to the FET and 7135 chips… so either it’s not running a derivative of Narsil, or they did some work to port it to another MCU.
A Q8 with USB charging would make a perfect gift :+1:
But this is in dire need of experts opinion of quality of the changes, for example a “breathing” led button did not seem necessary and may introduce unnoticed problems.
Wellp, it’s got a “breather” sideclicky instead of constant-on like the Q8, and I don’t recall any battery-check option. I found some narsim “cheetsheets”, and yeah, it looks like a PhD dissertation vs the DC7’s manual/options.
Frankly, I managed to get it into stepped modes (vs ramping), and could only manage to go backwards with a long-press. Too short, and it just shuts off (duh). So back to ramping…
Hate “breathers”, so the only other option was to keep the sideclicky turned off. Oh well…
So… quick braindead ramp-up/ramp-down seems fine to me. Shortcuts to lowest/highest are great, too. Probably all the other stuff was edited out for the “simple” version of the UI.
If it’s all freely available in source, wouldn’t it be easier to just pilfer it as a whole, than to try diddling with it trying to copy it one feature at a time?
If they did start with narsim, they might’ve just lopped off parts they didn’t want to bother with, to muggleify it.
Anyhoo, up/down/lowest/highest is fine with me. That’s pretty much all I ever do with my real Q8.
Sounds like they went with one simple mode set rather than the 8-12 or so Narsil supports. It's simpler in that way I guess...
Yes, they did the mimicking in a pretty bad way. Probably used the source code, simplified couple things, maybe ported to a different MCU, not sure.
It's a real, true violation of the principle the source code was released under. I suppose mimicking is honoring, and can't blame them, but they could have thrown us a bone - mentioned it's based on the BLF users, contributions, etc. - even not me personally, but to at least mention our forum...
Funny - Amazon did publish my question, quoted earlier...
This was me: This looks like a sofrn q8 copy, adding charging and slight style changes. why did you copy the sofirn q8?
Don-cha just luv it? We are famous and good enough to be cloned! Wait, didn't we clone the SRK or SupFire M6 with the Q8? Well.........
You know, that's do-able. For that we need direct contact with the fabricators in China, or even elsewhere. But basically, lot of these manufacturers simple contract out the work. You could probably contract out at different levels (full soup to nuts or just parts), different levels of quality too. Of course not many here speak Chinese and have the contacts - this is why you can use a go-between.