if too many changes, why not design a new one?
That sounds nice. Hopefully sofirn can also improve it to be more waterproof. Maybe just add o-ring for the front cover like the nitecore hc60 and 65. I’m starting to like this headlamp after the emitter and optics swap but can not recommend it for outdoor wet season use because of its lack of waterproofing. I doubt it can survive continuous rain at it’s present state.
@Barry, I know this might be a bit far fatched, but why not make a 1200lm D25S SST-40s and a D25S CRI with 4000k 95CRI SST-20 LEDs?
Best of both worlds.
I mean press and hold to cycle through modes: Low/Med1/Med2/High/Turbo. 
because the size of emitters are different. XML2 and SST40 both are 5050, XPG2 and SST20 are 3535
Your changes to this light sound good, Barry. I’ve seen listings for neutral CCT (around 5000K) versions of the SST-40 popping up at electronics suppliers. Any chance in sourcing some of these?
SST40 5000K emitters to sell?
Astrolux/Mateminco is using the NW SST-40's in the new FT03.
Ohhh… so they physically exist, not just the product listings? That’s encouraging!
Yep, definitely. Someone who received the NW of the FT03 took a pic of the LED and matches an SST-40 exactly. Also he described the tint as NW, so should be pretty well verified. I got 2 NW's on order but probably will take a few days at least to get one. Problem is they are lower bin, so lower lumens output - sort of a bad thing because the nice feature of the SST-40's was the super lumens output.
Gchart, what do you charge for an MCU with RampingIOS?
Should I take my D10 apart and verify what the driver looks like?
I’ve got two D10’s, so why not try it on one?
A quick driver question, do those big resistors (sense resistors I guess) directly reduce output between the led and ground? How do they not burn up?
I removed one resistor in all mine D10’s. Output dropped about 30% in all modes, but i think it’s still to high
Not sense resistors, but current limiting resistors. But yes, your summary of their function is correct. They’re in series with the LED. The more resistance, the less amount of current that makes it to the LED. Think of it like having one of our FET drivers, but intentionally using really long and thin LED wires (for extra resistance) to keep the amps a bit lower.
The only thing I have done is swap the MCU. Since it appears that the D10 driver is slightly different, unsoldering the MCU and snapping a decent pic of where the traces are running would help confirm if and changes are needed for the firmware (pin reassignments).
One of the locals where I’m doing fieldwork borrowed my modddd D25 and after using it asked me if he could have it for himself. I could not say no☹️. Its either that or my E21A Armytek Elf so opted to give him the D25. I guess I have a reason to buy the Sofirn D25S when it’s available. Hopefully with neutral white SST-40s or high CRI 3535 leds.
So it looks like the D25 has a total current resistance of 0.266 ohm with a measured 2.5A load on high. That’s 1.25A per emitter.
The D10 looks to be 0.333 ohm with a measured 1.9A load on high.
I wonder how many amps it would pull with the current limiting resistors bypassed? I might temporarily try that later just to measure the results. Maybe I’ll try tweaking the total resistance of my D10 to that of the D25 and see what happens.
I’m guessing the resistors act as a cheap thermal limit to prevent overheating since the driver doesn’t have any thermal control. I can’t remember, did anyone have any issues with the D25 getting too hot?
Hmm, does this indicate that the resistors are in-parallel instead of in-series?
Yes, you can see this in the driver pics. The left side of each resistor is shared. The right side is also shared.
Removing one resistor from the D10 changes the resistance from 0.333 ohm to 0.500 ohm. The resistance goes up so lumens go down.
As stock, my D25 got very hot. I didn’t think to measure it, but hot enough that I couldn’t hold it. By changing the MCU it could do thermal regulation which helps with how little thermal mass this thing has.
the heat sink is not good on D25, I was told the brightness getting down slowly once it turns on Turbo.