Perhaps I just got a bad M43. It doesn’t perform how other people say theirs perform. This is how mine behaved in a water-cooled runtime test at full power. The brightest it got was about 5000 lm.
I measured standby current on mine too. At boot time, without pressing anything, standby drain was about 96 uA. But if I press the button to turn the light on and off, the button changes from red to green, and then it uses about 67 uA.
On a D18, standby current measured at 30 uA. It could be lower by not enabling BOD, but then it would be hard to get out of momentary mode. It needs at least some parasitic drain to make it possible to reboot the MCU by loosening the battery tube.
For a FET driver, it’s normal advice to clean the contacts, bypass the springs, make sure the batteries are full, use new high-amp cells, etc. So I do. But it seems like strange advice for a boost driver. Isn’t a boost driver designed to deliver consistent output even without these things? It is meant to perform the same even if the cells aren’t quite full or even if the contacts aren’t completely clean.
That’s why I use a ZebraLight as a calibration reference light — it emits the same amount of light regardless of what battery it has or how recently I cleaned it. But I don’t use a Meteor for this purpose, because its output is highly variable and chaotic. I never know how much light it’s going to make.
I think you’re conflating concepts in order to make a point which isn’t strong enough to make otherwise. If complicated was truly better, we would be living in a steampunk world full of Rube-Goldberg machines.
I recognize that it is common to think of “simple” as primitive, basic, dumb, or unable to do much… and to think of “complicated” as powerful, advanced, and capable. But that doesn’t accurately represent how things work out in practice. Simple things are often more useful, while more complicated designs generally have more problems.
A lot of tech follows the same pattern as it becomes more mature:
- Phase 1: primitive (simple + basic)
- Phase 2: developing (complicated + basic)
- Phase 3: fancy (complicated + advanced)
- Phase 4: mature (simple + advanced)
It can be tempting to view phase 3 as the end of this process. That’s where things look the most impressive, with all sorts of fiddly bits to make it look sophisticated. It’s the steampunk aesthetic. And I like steampunk… I decorated my living room that way. It’s fun.
But although phase 3 is powerful, it often solves the wrong problems. Complicated things may be easy to do, but people don’t actually need to do those things very often. The things people need are often inconvenient in a phase-3 product. For example, ever hand someone a ZebraLight and then they ask “how do I make it a little bit brighter?” It’s weirdly complicated to do that simple task on a ZebraLight. It can take like 20 clicks to go up one level.