Fireflies E07 preview

For me who work as security gurd E01 looks like a good option but it pales in performance… also… it looks to have a lot bigger candela judging by the beam shot on the website.
For a security guard you want less candela and more lumen. Anyway E07 and ST20 gives a good balance between flood and throw. Throw is overrated I think… for most situations lower candela and high lumen is to prefer…how ever for some people they require good throw all the time… depending on activity… E07 and ST20 give good balance between the two… I dont have exact numbers how much it throw etc…

I might consider the E01 as secondary flashlight… the batterylife should be very good since its only one led and 21700 battery. The price is very good.





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Do your images with the above code and it will fit to the screen. Also, since you are using imgur if you add an 'h' to the end of the filename like I did above it will resize it to 1024 width I think.

Odd, I thought it was exactly the opposite… a security guard would probably want to see far away, no?

O'L, when working as an evening security guard, described scenarios where he needed throw to give a shot down long views - he definitely needed some throw in his duties. Interesting he always preferred CW for these lights.

Well it depends little bit on scenario, for your information I keep my Sofirn SF36W with me if I need more throw, I have not really compared throw between the sofirn and E07.

Also security guard have different task and also guard differnt objects so it really depends on your task, for me personally low candela and high lumen is better.
Low candela gives almost 180 degree of view, this is good if there is an possible attacker in your near proxity which you might not see with a high candela light…
I think this video describe it well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qSOowE_LsY

Yes as I said… it becomes hot too fast for me… from cold start it become hot very fast… so I dont think they have done a very good job with the thermal performance on this one… its not that its not a problem to operate the flashlight even if its very hot since you hold in the back parts not the head… but with this thermal performance its not strange it have to throttle down a lot… I will try to change the sensor this week to allow 80 degrees… For version 2 I think we could expect better thermal performance… and SST 20 was supposed to have a lot better thermal performance then the nichia then I really wonder how much more bad it was with the nichia. Anyway nothing is perfect this is still better then all other out there, if you dont use turbo all the time you will still get a flashlight the outperform others which using turbo… so its important to keep this in mind… also price is good…

But yeah for version two the focus should be on thermal performance, cause its what reduce the performance right now…

The thermal performance is about as good as it’s going to get. It’s a hot rod and without something double the size it won’t make any difference

I have not said it’s easy… but to move innovation forward they need to think outside the box. Smartphones which share much of similar problems have starting to experiment with vapor chambers, I have not seen any exact numbers of having this and without… but might be worth to try…

75-100 watts. If you want a vapor chamber I suggest gloves :slight_smile:

Yeah, at these kind of power levels(50-70W+), even with so much thermal mass, it’s going to heat up massively.

Phones, at the absolute worst, only have to deal with 7,5-10W.

Yes true, but there is also a lot more space for cooling in a flashlight… vapor chamber seem to be the latest innovation right now in cpu cooling for mobile devices… it might be just a gimmick I don’t know… not seen A/B tests.

There are two ways to keep the light from getting hot so fast:

  • Add mass
  • Reduce power

So if you want something which heats up slower or can stay on the highest level indefinitely, you should look for something much bigger or much less bright.

There’s also the option of trying to increase efficiency of the LED and/or driver, but that has limited room for improvement. Basically instead of wasting 85% of the power as heat, an ideal light could get as low as maybe 56% wasted as heat. Still not great. So it’ll still need more mass or less power.

Some bigger lights have also resorted to the use of active cooling, building a cooling fan into the light itself… but that’s not a great option on small items, and even on the bigger ones it’s kind of obnoxious.

I think some kind of liquid cooling is the way to go…

Unless there’s a way to change physics, the E07 thermal performance is pretty much as good as it gets. Liquid cooling or vapor chamber will do nothing for a light of this size and output. If you don’t want it to heat up that fast, very simple, just run it at 1,000 to 2,000 lumens which is equivalent to the turbo modes on other flashlights of this size. Even a flashlight with 10x the mass will not be able to sustain the max output of the E07. The max output is meant for small bursts.

Yeah but this is one thing that surprised me, it heats up very fast also on High mode… not just turbo mode, with turbo mode it heats up very very fast…we are talking under a minute here…

It actually works really well with liquid cooling. I’ve done runtime tests this way before. Simply run cold water over the heat sink during use, and it should be able to stay at turbo until the battery is empty.

But if you mean a fully-sealed liquid cooling system, that doesn’t actually make much difference. Liquid heat pipes are good at getting heat from one place to another, but they have literally no effect on the overall heat-shedding capabilities. That depends on the surface area and the surrounding environment. So if it can disperse 20W of heat in the current design, it’d still only be able to disperse 20W of heat after having liquid cooling pipes installed. The main difference is it would theoretically heat up the host more evenly, so the back half would get hot faster and it would be more uncomfortable to hold.

Yep.

A vapor chamber works really well if you have the surface area+cooling to be able to dissipate the heat.

The only thing that would be left to do to aid in cooling would be to go the Amutorch way, but with some modification.

See, the Amutorch VG10 21700 has a very thick body tube onto which the head sits on.

It’s one 21700 light that can actually sustain around 1000 lumens constantly, but gets a bit hot.

Why? The thick body tube transfers heat to the battery tube, meaning more surface area can be used to cool off the light.
The disadvantage to this is that since it isn’t finned, it doesn’t dissipate a lot of heat, but still helps.

So, here are the theoretical improvements that could be done:

  1. Make a thick battery tube with a large connection to the head.
  2. Make some fins on that battery tube. Even small ones can help.
  3. Put some high melting point paraffin wax inside of the light.

If you think a minute is fast, you should try some other “hot rod” lights. Some get too hot to hold in like … 10 seconds.

Mostly though, it sounds like you probably should avoid hot rod lights entirely. They clearly aren’t what you’re looking for. They’re designed to burn through power as fast as possible to make the brightest beam possible, even if only for a short time. So if you want the highest mode to last a while, look elsewhere. Or pretend “medium” is the highest mode, and it’ll behave more like other lights. The higher levels are entirely optional, and only intended for brief bursts.

As I said before, Personally I dont mind the heat… I know where the hold the flashlight to not burn… I hold my hand on the battery tube which is somewhat unaffected of the heat… the problem I have is how the heat throttle the performance…sustained performance is important… or atleast improve the heating build up time…