Great that it worked out. Personnaly I solder a solid wire to the base of the spring and pull on it, the IF25’s driver (same construction) came off easily this way.
Now I wonder if I could flash Anduril on it (the stock firmware is proprietary with tint ramping), but I’m stil a bit clueless about firmware flashing.
The charging problem of missing resistors sounds like the same issue the LT1 had? I didn't follow that issue closely but they fixed it in newer shipped batches, I understand.
I received my IF25A couple days ago and noticed some messy contaminants on the MCPCB and brass contact button. Cleaned it up well with isop. alcohol and added a 20 AWG bypass that gives it a nice bump with a 40T.
I'll be upgrading Anduril as well but don't think I could take on your flashing mod because of parts, etc.
@flashburn could you explain one more time how you got the driver out. In case you have pictures, that would be awesome. I would love to flash a more recent version on this flashlight.
Thank you. Since you have updated your flashlight, do you know of any known bugs in the default firmware? I know there are additional features in the newer Anduril, but are you aware of any bugs in the stock firmware?
Flashing the IF25A worked with the SP36 hex of Anduril2 from here: http://toykeeper.net/torches/fsm/anduril2/
The first builds of Anduril2 were not so good, so I reflashed Anduril1 until recently.
“anduril.2021-10-25.sofirn-sp36.hex” is actually quite nice.
The switch light is still configurable, even a bit easier to do so.
The flashing procedure is the usual ATtiny85 procedure decribed many times in the forum.
To reach the pins, you need to unscrew the bezel, then carefully take out the TIR without breaking the standoffs by pulling it straight out. Be careful not to touch the TIR with fingers or anything dirty.
Then unscrew the battery tube and the ring from the switch. Take out the silicone switch cover.
Then desolder the wires to the LED-MCPCB. Be careful, they are silicone and quite easily to destroy the insulation.
Loosen the switch PCB and take out the controller PCB stack by gripping the brass knob from the battery side.
Both PCB are glued into place, so a bit of force is needed to get them moving.
The switch PCB has to be noodled through the head opening.
To access the ATtiny85, the top PCB has to be carefully desoldered and removed. Take note of the orientation of the top PCB, as a mistake here will lead to an explosion later.
After flashing put everything together in reverse order.
Be careful to align the top PCB traces to the traces of the standoff bridge.
To pull the LED wires through the MCPCB, it makes sense to temporarily solder a longer wire to the pack of three and use this to pull the three wires though. Be careful to solder each wire to it’s correct pad. Risk of catastrophic failure here.
There is a notch in the PCB and a peg inside the head to find the correct orientation for the USB socket.
There is no need to glue the PCB in place, as they will be held by screw-on parts anyway.
It is definitely not the easy flash, because of the many dis/assembly steps and the good tools needed, like desoldering pump and a really good soldering iron. Separating the PCB without burning them, soldering on the LED-MCPCB, all need to be well trained skills to make this work.
Good luck!
PS: Aah, forgot, after resoldering the LED wires, clean the LEDs from fume deposits with a jet of pure Isopropyl Alcohol or IPA-Pentane.Cleaning makes the light run less hot and gives visibly more output.
Thanks so much for this reply. Glad to hear the sp36 hex works well for it. I plan to use probes to access the chip instead of desoldering the top board. Fingers crossed! I already swapped out the sst20s for some 2700k lh351d and it is great. Definitely want anduril 2 on it though. How is the thermal management with the sp36 hex?
Thermal management on the hardware itself is less than optimal, as it relies only on the ATtiny’s internal sensor. So there is a lot of slack in this: LED heat the head which heats the PCB which heats the ATtiny.
Anduril2 manages to work surprisingly well anyway, if you keep the temperature settings sane.