Andúril 2 coming to Sofirn - The general Sofirn development thread

I'm happy to see so much response on the idea of a Sofirn AA headlamp. It seems Sofirn is also interested. I quickly drew a design how it could look like in my imagination. As always, any feedback is highly appreciated. :-)

There are plenty of possibilities, like using a dual-optic design or a single-optic design (with a multi-emitter setup underneath like Armytek's Wizard WR). Since 300lm should be fine for a AA-sized and driven headlamp, maybe Nichia's E21A 98CRI could be a viable option (provided that Sofirn can get ahold of this LED). The driver should support a constant current regulation where both red and white light is fully regulated throughout the entire battery runtime. The USB-C port is probably disputable as these rubber boots get lost too easily. OTOH, I don't think magnetic charging (like Armytek/Olight) or a port inside the threads will be better options.

I am definitely interested if the finished product is similar to the sketch here. However, if it is not as light or lighter than my SKILHUNT H04 (46 g excluding battery) then there’s not much point for me; and Sofirn hasn’t really made any truly small lights. Most of their lights seem to be a tiny bit larger than most of their competitors.

Could Sofirn offer flashlights with sliced LH351D as an option?

Slicing leads to a warmer rosier tint with 10–20 less output.

That’s likely a manual process, also error-prone (slicing crooked, taking part of the phosphor with it, killing the LED itself, etc.), so I’d seriously doubt it.

Slicing is a manual process, but not necessarily error-prone. It should be fairly straightforward with the right tools and a bit of practice.

Many of us care more about tint than output, offering sliced LH351D could be an easy and inexpensive way for Sofirn to make their flashlights more desirable.

This would be great with the dual emitters. The E21A would be fantastic, and the 660nm deep red would be the best. Fixed modes are good for this on the initial UI, that way we have a means to guess runtime. I like ramping, but it does not give you a good idea of runtime for the level you are on. I know TK is working on the UI improvements, so this is something to think about during this process.

If the emitters are simply not able to be done in a dual format, then I hope the price is right so we can get both color emitters! Thanks on this LP!

Problem is, who’s going to check to make sure the slice went right? Any irregularity would result in nasty artifacts in the beam.

Just a few returns because of that, and I can guarantee no more sliced ’351s for sale.

Does anyone know what LED(s) Armytek uses for their Wizard WR? It seems to be an emitter with four dies, where two are used for red light and two for white light.

https://www.armytek.com/flashlights/models/wizard/armytek-wizard-wr-magnet-usb-white-red-light/

On TLF I found some information which seems to be an official reply from Armytek: "Cree XD16 (white), Cree XQE (red)"

That’s what Armytek also replied on reddit

Picked up a Sc31Pro. It’s great.

What are the chances Sofirn will release more of its lights with Anduril?

I’d love to see a SP40Pro with Anduril and type C charging.

I was thinking the same thing the other day. They could have Pro versions of lights with Anduril. SP40 Pro would be a great start.

I’m not sure since I’m not Sofirn, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more lights with Anduril. I’ve got Anduril 2 virtually complete, and mostly just need to finish making documentation for it… so it should be a lot easier for new users soon.

:+1: :+1: :+1:
Thanks TK.
I wanna try Anduril 2 for my SC31 Pro.

I very interested in a AA/14500 right angle/headlamps with Anduril, but personnaly I’d want it to be as small and lightweight as possible, like a Zebralight AA. Integrated charging would make it significantly bigger, as well as multi optics/LED channels designs, and I’m not sure feature creeping helps the realisation of a project.
That said I doubt they could achieve Zebralight size/weight, Sofirn don’t seem to make very small lights, their AA are on the larger side, and ZL put the LED and driver on the same PCB for space saving.

E21a could be nice yes, but I imagine would complicate design and manufacturing, with the 300lm figure you gave and 4500K 9080 it would mean ~1.2A drive current, which I think at this current would requires a good performing MCPCB with very low dielectric thermal resistance. 3535 design is simple and also modable.

There is the Manker E03h II that released recently, but it has a 10lm ”moonlight” with li-ion which is pretty bad, and the UI while improved doesn’t allow to cycle from ”moonlight” to low-mid etc, probably don’t have PID regulation either, I sure would prefer Anduril. Most of the other available AA/14500 headlamps are heavier and larger, there is Zebralight of course but they don’t support li-ion, which is a shame because the 14500 li-ion cells have significantly more energy.

Merci pour tes suggestions, thefreeman. I'm mostly d'accord with your feedback. The integrated charging circuit is a disputable feature for sure. Actually, I do not want any feature creep here but a very simple UI that can handle both red + white light modes. Consequently, this rules out using Andúril as it is too complex and it would require significant changes in its source code to work with dual emitters, working independently. There were some discussions among the LT1 team incl. ToyKeeper using a red light mode in the next evolution of Sofirn's LT1 and maybe it can be done with Andúril 2.0 by tweaking the tint ramping feature. But again, for now I doubt this will be the best idea for a small headlamp.

Comparing Sofirn's headlamps with Zebralight's headlamps is in my humble opinion a bit difficult. For one, because Zebralight is known for squeezing high-end technology into supersmall lights, e.g. SC64 with a fantastic boost circuit and stable output above 900lm. Their drivers are highly integrated and customized to the corresponding host design, using glue and potting. For second, also because Zebralight is quite a different pricing level, about 3-4x as much as Sofirn's (discounted) prices. If we aim for an AA lamp as small as Zebralight's H502pr there would be two scenarios in my lay imagination...

a) we should try to invite Zebralight to BLF with an educated proof of concept (and expect a sales price around $ 100.00)

b) we need Sofirn to divide their business into a 'budget line' and a 'premium line', where the latter one uses highly sophisticated drivers, hand-picked emitters, ultra-precise CNC machining and tooling etc.. - effectively with a smaller lot size and significantly higher prices, too

Sofirn has difficulties sourcing Nichia LEDs, so I am open for any recommendations that offer a great color rendition. SST20 4.000K 95CRI could be a nice alternative as it does not create as much tint shift as E21A. I wonder if Cree has anything to offer since they also sell HighCRI versions of their LEDs. I still try to find out what LED layout Armytek is using underneath the TIR optic of the Wizard WR. It seems they placed both XQE and XD16 in a two-by-two quad array, like Cree's XM-L color emitter. Maybe this would work nicely for this AA headlamp concept, too.

That’s at least the configuration the pictogram from Armyteks description of the light suggests:

https://www.armytek.com/flashlights/models/wizard/armytek-wizard-wr-magnet-usb-white-red-light/

Kind regards
Frederick

Yeah, having two independent types of LED is not a recipe for small. To optimize for size, the question isn’t what can be added, but what can be removed.


I had a headlamp with red LEDs… a Nitecore HC50. It used “click for white, or hold for red”. And while on, half-press the button to change modes or brightness levels. Pretty simple. But I often forgot it had a red mode since I never had a use for it. I mostly remembered when I tried to “hold for moon”, and got bright or flashing red instead. Then to reach moon, I had to turn it off, click for white, then half-press several times to rotate brightness through turbo and back to moon.

The dual-stage button was kind of neat, but in practice I found it mostly got in the way. Quite frequently, it would register a half-press on the way to making a full press… and then activate both functions. Like, click for on/off with memory was nice… but it’d often register a half press for “rotate brightness up” while turning the light off. So it’d often come on next time at the next mode, like having next-mode memory except less predictable. Same with the red mode group… was never sure which red mode it would use next time I turned it on.

It was simple, but it wasn’t intuitive or convenient. The fancy extras were neat, but they came at the cost of some basics like predictability and direct access to low modes without cycling through high modes.

Anyway, I think a single e-switch UI with two different independent LED types could be done well… but it would need to be a complete from-scratch new design built for that purpose. Anduril is not designed for that, and would not be a good choice for this type of light.

Can we have a SP31v3, with single frequency strobe (10Hz) instead of the alternating frequency strobe, and mode memory for strobe mode (as per the original SP31) so that strobe can be accessed by the forward clicky switch?
That would create the best budget light for light painting!

I’d like to put in a bid for making C01 lights with a variety of colored emitters —- blue, aqua, green, yellow, amber, and orange— like the lights Arc AAAs used to offer.
for extra collectible goodness, anodize the light tubes in matching colors, as was done with the C01R far red model.

AAA lights need sub lumen mode that it’s usefull for close ispection. I hope Sofirn will made C01S tail clicky version with 4 level bright