Howdy,
I am working on making a flashlight for a school project and am not sure about some of the part selection. It is going to be based off of a S2+ format with a 20mm MCPCB and 17mm Driver board and Eswitch. I want to use either a quad or triple SST20 pcb in parallel from Kaidomain, but I was not sure how to tell which drivers are compatible with Eswitch and how much power I realistically need.
I found Mountain Electronics had their Moonlight special drivers, which I can add additional 7135s to increase the current output and I can choose firmware, or the DrJones H17Fx Driver w/ lucidrv2 - 7135 + FET, which from what I understand has 3 amps of controlled current and then becomes direct drive in turbo mode.
Are there other drivers that I am not seeing that would be better picks and somewhat cheaper to purchase and compatible with an eswitch?
I believe all of the drivers you’ve listed are for tail switches only. Convoy have a couple of e-switch 17mm drivers but they seem limited to 3A of current:
The H1 driver:
The S9 driver, which also has charging built in:
Some drivers can be modded by changing a sense resistor to increase the current output, but I’ve never done it and I’m not sure if these are suitable for it.
Alternatively there’s the LUME1-FW3X, which is a pretty advanced 22mm buck/boost/FET e-switch compatible driver developed by loneoceans:
There’s also his LUME X1, which is a high powered boost driver which would work well with a triple or quad in series:
In terms of power, I’ve just built a Nichia 219b s2+ triple with a 5A driver which puts out a respectable amount of light and gets warm but not that hot. I’ve also got an s21 Luxeon V triple with a FET driver which pulls over 15A on a fully charged cell and can set things on fire. You probably want to aim somewhere between the two!
Perhaps I am not understanding what you are proposing, but I see some issues.
If by S2+ you are referring to the Convoy S2, many folks have built triples. That does require the use of a spacer under the mcpcb. Carclo has an assortment of optics to choose from in their 105xx series. A 20mm quad mcpcb might be fitted but the Carclo quad 106xx series optics are 24mm diameter and won’t fit the S2 head.
The S2+ I know is designed for a clicky switch, not an e-switch. To use an e-switch in a tube light where the switch is intended to be located in the tailcap we run into the same problem that Fritz faced when designing the FW3A… how to run the required two electrical connections from the e-switch in the tail to the driver in the nose.
The H1, S9 and Lume1 drivers that were suggested are either too big or have components (the charger port) that preclude their easy use in the S2+ Convoy lights I am familiar with.
A tube light like the S2+ can get hot very quickly with FET drivers and a hi-amp cell. If you are at the beginning of your learning curve you might want to stick with a linear driver like the Qlite 105C. With 3.04 amps, in the configuration sold by mountainelectronics, it would produce a high level of lumens, just not the higher, and hotter, levels that could be produced with an FET driver.
I wanted to sneak into this post and have a question about the spacers for the S2+ triple build. So aside from building a custom one myself, there are only 2 places to get built copper spacers now and that would be either at Mountain or from kiriba-ru??
Just to clarify what I meant by a S2+ format. Yes I did mean the Convoy S2+ but I will not be using the original host, I have a few convoy s2+ already, all single emitters, but I will be machining all of the parts such as the pill, battery tube, bezel, ect. So the part of the S2+ format was just referring to the size of the components like the MCPCB, Driver Board and 18650.
Edit: If I was to go for a single emitter, what would you suggest for high lumen output around 5000K and 90+ CRI?
