I saw some recent reviews of Olight’s new i5R EOS copper light (Olight link ) that runs on an included 14500 or any AA cell, and one thing that caught my attention was the mention of its 2.4 volt lithium-ion battery.
Oh great, yet another propriet…wait, 2.4 volts?!?
I can’t seem to find out any solid information about it but photos show it to be a 1420mAh lithium-ion cell with onboard USB-C charging port in a 14500 package giving 3.4Wh.
They state that running a normal 3.7v lithium-ion cell will damage the light. No idea what emitter is in there. No Olight reviewer ever seems tech-oriented and thus there don’t seem to be any helpful measurements yet, but the manual states that full brightness may not be reached when using standard AA cells vs. the included special one.
So…how are they doing all of this, what’s going on?
My first guess was adoption of a lithium supercapacitor and everything kind of makes sense there except for the nice large capacity. Browsing around the web briefly, about the most I see for the 14500 size supercaps is 500mAh. The ones that list 1400mAh are 18650 size. These (on alibaba mostly) are listed as lithium titanate (or LTO if you add the “oxide”). I don’t know if that’s a significant difference in naming or not. That’s about all I can find.
Representative example from a company who seems to be one of the bigger players: Huahui New Energy Htc 24v 14500 2.4v 500mah Lithium Titanate Battery Lto 14500 With Excellent Quality - Buy Storage Batteries Lto Battery,Rechargeable Lithium Ion Battery,Huahui New Energy Lithium Battery Product on Alibaba.com
Wiki entry on lithium supercaps: Lithium-ion capacitor - Wikipedia
Or…is it possible that they’ve added some kind of boost circuitry to the cell in the add-on charging board and the magic jellyroll within is a lithium-ion similar to the rechargeable low volt Tenavolt cells?
I can’t find the Olight cell for sale anywhere or else I’d consider getting one to take a peek inside…really curious about this one.
The light itself isn’t very impressive at all in terms of output or performance, typical Olight there.
Cell photo borrowed from 1lumen’s review.
!https://1lumen.com/wp-content/uploads/olight-orbc-145c14-14500-battery-1.jpg !