Lumintop Ant Man (14500 LEP flashlight)

I have a few images in my review in case you're interested: https://1lumen.com/review/lumintop-ant-man/

Thanks Marco. It does kind of look like the copper pill as seen in the astrolux lights, no? Maybe smaller?

I’m not so sure. The driver in the bottom of the head is not in a pill. It appears to be press-fit or glued in place.

There is what could be a small copper pill visible inside the top of the light. It could be a small pill holding the laser module, but not the driver. Or it might just a retaining ring holding an internal lens over the phosphor.

Great review! Let’s hope lumintop reaches out and addresses the problems you found!

The LEP module is a cilinder that looks like threaded in place from the battery side. There is probably two wires coming out of the module that are soldered onto the driver, and the driver is then glued in place. To access the module you need to remove the driver. There is no holes from the front that can get you the option to poke with something. There are two small holes in the driver though, you may use that for prying but with the risk to ruin something on the driver.

So i can confirm that when Ant goes off, battery is at 3.2V (that is when i noticed it’s off) and pulling 23mA.

Recharching battery now and i’ll try again what are Amps when fully loaded

Thanks.. that's still lower than my 100+mA when it turns off, although still quite high for parasitic drain.

Curious how deep it will discharge if you let it sit ;)

wonder if a protected battery could prevent overdischarge

until a better driver is found

Hi Jonathan,

I think it was designed to be used with their protected 14500 in mind. I think it should work well with it.

good to know,
all the test reports were unprotected high drain flat tops, I think

still concerned that the parasitic drain is excessive… and hope for an improved driver

atm it seems to me that the GT Nano w 10440 tube, might be the better thrower option… better beam, more reach, less money

or GT Micro or GTA?

while the Ant Man may be disappointing, it seems to be the best 14500 thrower for it’s size. All other 14500 throwers which outperform it have a bigger head. Hopefully Lumintop sells enough of the Ant Man to entice other manufacturers to produce more affordable LEPs.

You can find more hardware details here.

LEP module is small enought to fit into AAA sized flashlight.

https://imgur.com/gallery/SI6Q4W1

Pretty lame design, imo.

No design at all, they just made an empty flashlight body and i guess they bought that LEP module somewhere else.

But they were the first to do a really small LEP flashlight, and it works (although some better than others), and it turned out a better throwing flashlight than anything before in this size. Lumintop gets my credits for that.

And now a better one must be made.

Wise words djozz.

If that’s all it takes, who wants to start a BLF LEP and take on designing a driver? :smiley:

… and give it a sliding bezel to make it a zoomie! A true zoomie with a wide enough flood mode for close-in use.

A simple buck boost driver could be like this :

Monomode, capable of 2A output at 4Vout (likely too much for the module used in the Ant Man, here it’s set at 1A), no thermal regulation (no MCU), but it does have LVP thanks to the R1/R2 divider on the Enable pin. We could do without the 2.5V voltage reference by connecting R3 to VOUT, but the current will be quite approximate due to the Vf variation, the LDO used for the VREF is quite cheap anyway.
By some miracle this BB converter is still in stock at Mouser and is actually slightly better than the one used in the lume1 driver.

With this it should still have a soft start at startup, the issue with the constant current topology I’m using in my other drivers is that it has the tendency to spike at startup, which apparently isn’t good for laser diodes.

For a more powerfull driver for driving a LEP module like this:

I would do something different since commonly available BB converter are not powerfull enough for 3A@4V, I would use a boost converter with a constant voltage output >= Vf and use a constant current linear regulation after that, since the Vf will be high even in thermal step-down the efficiency should remain good. A boost converter with passthrough would be used so that it just outputs Vin when Vin>Vout (e.g. when the battery is full).
The soft start function would also work properly in this case.

Hey folks, I rarely find myself on BLF, so just saw this thread.

My copy of AntMan does indeed produce 205lm at turn on with H10 battery, and around 100kcd inside at 6m. I measured 1.45A with clamp meter.

I’ll happily answer any questions I can.