Skills: very detail oriented, patient, and decent soldering abilities
Materials: attiny816 or 1616, my PCB, solder paste, desoldering braid or solder sucker
Equipment: soldering iron, a hotplate or hot air station, UPDI programmer
Process:
File any excess off the PCB and clean it up
Apply a small amount of solder paste to the PCB
Carefully align the attiny on the board
Reflow it with a hotplate or hot air
Touch up any solder bridges with your iron
Flash the firmware onto the attiny
Remove bezel and reflector from SP10S
Desolder the LED wires and gently push them into the holes they’re fed through
Push something like a toothpick through one of the holes and up against the outer rim of the driver, gently tap on it to break the driver free (it’s lightly glued in place). Try not to damage the LED wires or any driver components
Take the driver and desolder the two boards (it’s a T-shape 2-part driver)
Remove the existing MCU. Hot air really helps here
Solder the attiny adapter board in place, paying close attention to orientation
Reverse the process to put everything back together
Were it not for the global microcontroller shortage, I’d offer to send you a ready-to-go adapter board. But as it stands, I only have a couple attiny’s left and probably can’t get anymore for several months. That could also be part of the reason that this project has been quiet lately.
I am also still hoping for an Anduril light that supports AA (NiMH / Alkaline) as well as 14500 Li-ion batteries.
Lights that only support 14500 batteries like the FWAA would not persuade me to replace an 18650 powered light, even though they are smaller, unless they were also able to use NiMH and Alkaline batteries.
Even though I appreciate my hair-trigger tail switch FW3A lights; for EDC purposes, I prefer lights with a stiffer configurable lighted side switch that do not have inner control tubes.
The entire point of this thread is to achieve - and it has been done successfully - Andúril with alkaline/Nimh support.
The only limitations for anduril are that the microprocessors it currently runs on require a minimum voltage input. How that is achieved doesn’t matter much, and in this case it can be boosted from a AA input voltage.
Feel free to read the thread for more information.
I would never trade the ability to use alkaline and nimh in this light for the andruil interface. It is a huge utilitarian benefit to be able to use three different batteries. The andruil interface won’t do any for you if you need a light and you happen to have this one with a bunch of alkalines.
OP is updated with the big and great news. :-) I try to get more news from Sofirn at the end of next week. Currently, they face a considerable bottleneck of Andúril-compatible MCUs being unavailable. Let’s hope the supply situation will soon get better, so they can make our dreams come true.