[Review] NOCTIGON K9.3 by Hank Wang

Pretty impressive, that is a ton of revenue generation.

Hank sent me a message about this, so I investigated and fixed it. Weirdest bug I’ve seen in Anduril so far. Still not sure what exactly causes it, but it acts like a compiler bug or something. If I simply add some extra no-op instructions in the affected code path, the issue goes away.

It’s weird because it only affects the K9.3, even though the lockout and aux LED code is exactly the same on a bunch of other lights. Also weird because it goes directly from lockout to “off”, and there is no code path which does that any more. So that would suggest it’s rebooting, but it doesn’t do the boot-up blink. Also weird because a steady color works fine in the low or high modes, and every pattern (including blinking) works fine in disco / rainbow / voltage modes, but a single color blinking fails.

Updated builds:

I doubt it’s a compiler bug, since those are very rare in practice. I probably did something wrong… but I haven’t been able to figure out what. So I hope to give it a more proper fix if I can confirm what’s causing it. Would be helpful to build it pre-fix on other platforms, to check if the compiler version is relevant. The buggy version was built with gcc-avr 1:5.4.0+Atmel3.6.1-2 from Debian.

Also, code for the K9.3 is now available in the anduril2 branch.

am i right that the 2020-12-13 firmware version is affected by the “aux led single color blinking lockout bug”?

Yes, the issue wasn’t known or fixed until 2021-01.

I dunno, I received the Fireflies E12R a few days ago and I have nothing but troubles with the UI.
For some reason it seems to keep reverting back to the simple UI, switches back to stepped ramping, and the secondaries (even on low) are dimmer than the Emisar D4V2 I have (not sure if that`s because of the light or the UI though).
I wish there was a way to lock in the advanced UI to stop it from switching back to the Simple UI.
Gonna give it a few days just in case it`s my sausage fingers that`s causing the problem.

Fireflies has a new light? Interesting. I don’t know what they did with the code, since it doesn’t appear to be available. I suppose I’ll have to bug them about license compliance again. :frowning:

Four new lights actually. E12R, T9R, NOV-Mu and T1R. The latter one has not been seen in the wild(erness) yet but I asked Jacky to send me one for review. The 6A buckdriver is derived from Loneocean's Lume-1 driver and as far as I am informed Loneoceans made this custom driver for Fireflies. Not sure, if this information is of any help to sort the licensing issues, though.

https://www.ff-light.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=64

Not sold yet on this light. Seems overly complicated. Not saying I don’t like it.

D’oh?

If it doesn’t speak to you, don’t get one. It’s not something I would get, because it’s not a category of light I have a use for. I use wide “soup can” lights sometimes when I need many lumens for a long time, especially for photo lighting purposes or as a lantern. And I use “plunger” shape thrower lights sometimes when I need to see a long distance. But I don’t really see the appeal of a “plunger” shape flood light.

I would even use a soda can thrower (3×18650 is the best format I have ever used, but I would still use 3×21700, I guess). “Plunger” shaped floodlight is kind of ‘meh’ for me, too. Unless it is very special (still, not this one).

Well, I actually bought 3 of these and I love them. One of them is E21A 2000K on CH1 (my favorite indoor tint) with 660nm red secondaries. So awesome for use around the house.

I have another one that I carry when I’m out that has 4000K XP-L HI V2 5D + red secondary and it’s great to be able to activate the red for in the car, etc.

I understand why it couldn’t be/wasn’t done for the K9.3, but I’d still love to see a tint ramping light from Hank.

Oh yeah me too. Great idea

2000K/2200K + 6500K E21A tint ramping light would be an instant buy for me.

Hank does tint mixing… I have a D18 with an even mix of 2700 and 4000’s. Beautiful soft yellow beam like an old maglight

Mixes are one thing, I mean a light like the Sofirn IF25 or LT1 that can smoothly and gradually transition between each extreme. Having the top and bottom end of most white lighting - and everything in between! - from a single light is super appealing to me.

That’s wild… I didn’t even know there were single LEDs that can vary the tint of the light they emit. I figured it was done by having multiple LEDs of different tints and adjusting the intensity of each of them to get the different tints

I think the 4 LED's are wired on 2 different output channels, therefore the firmware can control the levels of each pair independently. So if you have a pair of WW tint and a pair of CW tint, by mixing percentages, you can have a resulting beam of NW and every tint between WW and CW.

I tried to get Hank to make a D4 or KR4 with tint ramping… but he didn’t like the idea.

The downsides are:

  • It would be even harder to wire together… and the D4v2 is already quite a pain to assemble.
  • Less total light output, especially at extreme CCTs.
  • Less-smooth beam, especially at the extreme CCTs.
  • Would need to design and manufacture a new MCPCB.
  • Would need to either reduce to one power channel per LED group, or design a new driver with 4 power channels instead of 2.

The upsides are:

  • Ramp from warm white to cool white or anything between.
  • Rosy tint on middle CCTs.
  • Hank could reduce the number of models he carries… instead of 4 tints for each of 3 LED types, he could carry a single model for each LED type.

It would be cool to have, but it’s also a lot of work to make it happen… and he’s pretty busy.