[Review] Airpro DC7

Ok, thanks again! It's clearly our FET+1 design with the good 7135, just not sure of the MCU - can't make out the labeling.

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.

Just got mine today, pretty nice. Only tried it with 1 cell from my MH20, so didn’t crank it up to 11 or anything, but the basics seem to work.

Curious, what’s different about the UI, that Airpro wanted to “simplify”, vs the Q8?

Just ordered another as a spare :person_facepalming: , and would’ve gotten yet another to gift if I could’ve snagged ’em at 43 vs 51.

Still, build quality looks nice, threads are nicely lubed and gliiiiiide nicely, tint/color is pretty good… all in all, I’m happy. :slight_smile:

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.

I dig the Green Eye that never sleeps … great for the nitetime locator. I am very pleased with mine so far.

That’s my only gripe. I hate “breathers”. Constant-on, or beacon, great. Breather, nope. Turned mine back off again.

Nighttime, that “movement” would just be too distracting. Even the “beacon” on my MH20’s switch is too distracting.

Constant-on tailcap of my Cometa (or Q8)? Just fine. Go figure…

They “Simply” didn’t want to give credit due for license of software so they pretended to have changed it :slight_smile:

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.

Seems like they tried to copy NarsilM, but couldn’t do it perfectly.

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.........

This is why we have to take this matter into our own hands.

We’ve worked with Chinese manufacturers before, and we have the proof some of them are very willing to work with us.

The next step would be to make a true BLF flashlight.

One with components from members all around the world, built with BLF standards and excellent quality control.

We need to show manufacturers that we are a powerful force to be reckoned with.

Maybe I should do a post about my plan… But that is something completely different.

Just complying with the GPL V2/V3 would be fine.

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.

…and you’ll have a GoPanda or ElfLion knockoff of the light hitting BG/GB/etc. before the “real” version’s even announced.

True... Hhmm, kind of like Manker?

That’s why you manufacture the parts, and then assemble them somewhere else.

Is this flash able with Narsil?

Might get rid of the breathing light switch.

Would be nice.

Imagine if it’s a narsim knockoff, the µC is the same, but I’ve got no idea if anyone’s compared.

Think earlier I here I asked bout the driver, and someone posted the driver pics and appears to be a PIC controller, not ATMEL. Very rare to find ATMEL in production lights. In fact early on in the Q8 development, the ThorFire engineering team decided to implement our UI on a PIC, totally re-wrote our/my provided firmware, and really messed it up. They ended up firing the engineers, started over from scratch with out ATtiny85 and our firmware.

On this one they probably did like a true port of the code to a PIC because they seemed to dupe the UI pretty well.

Thank you.

So No?