Convoy has been on my radar for as long as I’ve been working on the flashlight database. It wasn’t possible back then to even consider adding them though. Simon simply didn’t publish hard information about his lights. No information published means no information to go into a database. And that meant no database.
Simon has gradually been improving his product descriptions and now almost half of them might mention LED lumens or candela. But they still have a disorganized mess of Aliexpress listings instead of an actual website. They make it hard for anyone to provide accurate specs and even Simon has complained about it:
↑↑↑Pls ignore above parameters,it’s written by the aliexpress system↑↑↑
color of tailcap is black
color of tailcap is black
Additionally people like myself who want to look at everything in a store are quickly locked out of Aliexpress for acting like a bot. It isn’t a good time for anyone.
Periodically I would check up on Convoy to get an idea of how difficult it would be to clean up the mess. In the most extreme case it was 100% impossible because Simon deleted every page from Aliexpress for 1 month. But things have been improving. There are “only” 167 Aliexpress URLs for his flashlights. Many of these are color variations. For example 33 pages are just for different versions of the S2+. Each of those pages might have 8-16 different combinations of LED selection and driver configuration. It is safe to say that Simon probably sells at least 1000 different flashlights. And those are just the official versions. He’ll put together nearly any custom request too. That probably increases it to 5000 different lights.
I guess it would be possible to make a database of only Convoy products. But that would be quite an undertaking and splitting lights across multiple databases doesn’t help people that much. It would be nearly useless anyway since the vast majority of LED options are never tested for lumens/runtime/candela.
What about looking at it from the other direction? What is the fewest number of lights that Convoy makes? In all there are only 34 different models of flashlight. That is a perfectly reasonable number of products. Maybe people will be okay with the lack of specifications. Or that 150 different combinations are packed into 1 database entry. It would bother me but if you guys are okay with it…. maybe something could be done.
However the entire process would still suck. I enjoy organizing information. Not sleuthing it out. I’ve tried typing up a few to see how bad it is. Its pretty bad. But this is where you guys come in. I’m more than willing to slog through miles of crap when someone has a serious interest in seeing it happen. Sign up for the Patreon and tell me you want to see Convoy happen.
Ultimately it will probably be somewhere in between. Certainly not 1000s but probably more than 34 listings. I do have a habit of giving high CRI lights their own entry and would likely extend that courtesy to Convoy’s high CRI offers.
Mostly this will help people be aware of the variety of models and LED options Simon has. There are a lot of lesser known gems buried in the store. It feels like people only ever talk about 3 or 4 models out of the 34 Convoy makes. For example how many people have heard of the BD03? It has integrated charging for normal 18650s. Costs just $25. And has been around since 2015. This should have been a go-to for gifting to non-flashaholics who didn’t want to bother with charging batteries.
What do you think? Anyone interested?