Great video and some very nice mods. A few comments:
āWeāre all familiar with the foxtonā
You mean the fauxton. āfauxā being french and pronounced āphoā and means fake. It is still pronounced pho-ton. Get the joke?
I do agree with you on CR2032 being a nice little battery. It is my favorite for last-ditch lights.
Those remote phosphor LEDs look great! Iāve just looked through 2000 products on Aliexpress and Alibaba trying to find a supplier. Came up empty handed though. Tell us if you ever manage to find them.
I also really like the idea of the always-on firefly bypass resistor. I will have to add that to some of my lights.
It runs on 2xCR2032 and comes with a Nichia LED. It has possibly the most impressive diffuser Iāve seen on a lantern this size. Conical mirror combined with a reeded linear optic. Of course I replaced the LED with a 3200k yuji. The keychain junk was replaced with a lanyard. I make my lanyards a bit longer than yours - just long enough to slip over a door knob. The battery situation was trickier. What I ended up doing was replacing a CR2032 with a thin rare earth magnet. So now it is dimmer and I can stick it just about anywhere between the lanyard and the magnet.
You made me decide to buy 2 lights.
The NEBO and the smallest CR2032 ones. Though I fail to find a cheap source of the latter, FT seems the best, $3.51 for a 10-pack with the BLF coupon. I have a feeling they can be had for lessā¦
I wish i knew who makes those remote-phosphor warm-white 5mm LEDs, as they are the most efficient, widest light-angle tiny low-power LEDs i ever seen. these seems to glow the brightest of any LED i ever tested for a white LED on a 300K+ or higher resistor. (other than the tiny straw-hat blue LEDs) So far its only in the Walmart $1 garden solar lights i have found them.
I had a search last night for the remote phosphor LEDs and couldnāt find any, but just did a quick google for 360 5mm LED and there are a few in the image search.
The other ones I thought may be good for a even light are the filament LED, like you get in retro bulbs. They are easy to find on eBay, aliexpress etc.
Maybe sanding the dome on one of rngwnās LEDās would result in a comparable light distribution? There would be a little bit of light loss, but it should diffuse it.
I have thought about trying those filament LEDs, they do seem like a good idea for small lanterns. I was always curious though of their efficiency vs. amp draw, as the filament LED used a couple dozen tiny separate LED diodes along a micro PCB strip, coated in a remote phosphor ātubeā as such, versus a single remote-phosphor 5mm that uses a single LED diode in the center. Some of those 5mm LEDs in that 360 degree search does look close to the ones i have.
Just 2 cents, by sanding down the dome of LED, you might want to leave some slight arc to mitigate the output loss due to (total) internal reflection. (And thatās the reason why the wide angle LEDs are strawhat-shaped)
For regular LED epoxy, the refractive index should be about 1.5, which translates to ~41 deg of critical angle. That means the incident angle from the phospors to the furthest edge of the dome should not exceed that angle (or try to minimize the distance towards the edge where the critical angle would be exceeded), or the light will go backward due to the internal reflection.