So after about 10 years of ownership, my flashlights driver decided to give out on me and now I need to either find a replacement driver or repair the bad component(s) on the driver board.
I was able to remove the driver from the unit and powered the LED using my lab bench power supply and it is working just fine so the driver is the culprit here.
Being so small and with so many components, I have no idea what to test first.
Does anyone know what usually fails on these or has a way to repair them with maybe a third party board that can be found on a Chinese website such as Aliexpress?
Any help getting my repair underway would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
Typically a schematic is needed to know where to probe and measure for troubleshooting.
It looks like some of the chips have the marking codes etched off, and there are no reference designators on the board, so it will be somewhat difficult to trace it out and draw up a schematic.
Maybe someone else has already done this or knows this circuit and will give you some help.
If the ic chips were identified then you could just replace them all without knowing the circuit.
The soldering was done by hand and is globby in places, and is used to bridge or create trace paths in some locations.
It can probably be repaired but may not be an easy task.
So here’s an update on the driver situation that might prove to be useful to anyone else who is faced with an untimely demise of their driver.
I was able to successfully repair the driver and restore the flashlight to a functional state with much time and concentration.
Being a tinkerer in electronics, I decided to start out by testing the values of all SMD resistors on the board and to my surprise, two of them were reading way off (512 or 5.1kΩ).
I then proceed to buy replacement parts and managed to solder them back onto the board although, since the ones I bought were slightly larger than the original ones, the only way to solder them in place was to relocate them elsewhere on the board with space for them via some copper wires and finally held everything in place with a UV activated epoxy.
I had to do that for two resistors on both sides of the PCB and although it felt like an exercise in futility, it seems like luck proved useful in this case and the repair was a resounding success!
My driver on my Sunwayman V10A broke years ago. I dropped the head during a battery change. It fell 1 meter onto a wooden floor. The anodizing was undamaged by the drop, but it did cause a component to pop off the driver.
Several years later, I repaired it by opening up the light and finding the loose part, then soldering it back on. It sorta works, but the ramp isn’t as smooth as before. Definitely not fully repaired.
I also had a V10r driver break. I accidentally put the battery in the wrong direction. It was only like that for a couple seconds, but that was enough to permanently screw up the ramping. Ever since, instead of a smooth ramp, the light would give a very gradual ramp through moonlight for about 70% of the ring travel. Then for the next 2% or so of the ring’s travel it would almost vertically ramp from moonlight to turbo. It’s still like that today.
