Wurkkos TS21 tear down

Please Note

This light has a big parasitic drain, moderately high with the switch LED OFF (116 uA) or on low (180 uA), not visible in room light, and excessively, exceedingly high at 13.5 mA with the switch LED on High.

Tear Down

A brief quick tear down of the TS21, a new model from Wurkkos.

Tools used to open the TS21 - gloves to get the SS bezel unscrewed, solder pick and hammer to "gently nudge" out the driver:

I needed the gloves because the bezel felt very tight, and it was. There's no glue but found a lot of resistance to unscrew it. As you can see, the SS bezel is surprisingly big with extra long threading:

This sheet they have hides the surface of the MCPCB, not sure why, maybe effects the beam artifacts perhaps?

Used the solder pick with light taps of the hammer, actually not that light, to break the glue seal of the driver. Not many will have the fortitude to do it this way but I have an excellent track record of not damaging anything, or if I do (rarely), I've been able to repair it. The important thing is tilt the pick as far to the outer edge of the driver as can go - less chance of damaging components This driver has plenty of open space at the edges. Also important for this driver: you must remove the LED wires first, they are as short as possible, no extra wire that is coiled. For this light, the solder pick slipped off the driver and damaged the threads, as shown here on the left side. It had no effect on threading on the battery tube though. The glue shown here is not hard, it's soft and sticky - weird, not sure if I ever saw a glue like this, but was easily removable, cleaned up well.

I'm guessing the shelf is about 2 mm thick, rather thin. The head by itself is very light weight, thermally there's not much here. Notice the de-burring of the wire center hole? Nice touch by manufacturing - don't see that often enough, I usually have to do it myself. The object to the right of the hole is the clear plastic tube in the center of the switch. Not sure if it's a true "light pipe" but acts as one for sure. The LED light has to bend and travel a ways in this setup, probably not the best way to do it.

The driver - pretty much a standard FET+1 with the switch LED, same configuration as a Q8 or SP36. I'm sure they used the SP36 configuration of Anduril 2.

Showing how the red stuff partially covered one of the switch dual LED's:

Stock setup of the MCPCB:

After sanding to 2000 GRIT, mirror finish:

Re-Installed with MX-4:

Re-using the stock wires, I'd say 20 AWG:

After assembly, no need to re-glue the driver - the screwed in battery tube will hold it in place. Now it's much easier to access for future mods or firmware updates. The MCU is easily accessible with a flashing clip.

SMD Info

Will be adding more info...

Important Note

It's difficult to recommend this light with the parasitic drain so exceptionally high with the switch LED set to High. It appears all TS21's being shipped with the amber switch LED and power bank feature have it this high drain. Of course the easy work-around is not use the high setting for the switch LED, but the low setting has very low brightness.

4 Thanks

You’re on fire with all these tear downs lately, this is very nice.

Nice, thank you!

:+1: Thanks.

Interesting. I’m waiting mine to arrive. I mainly thought to use it as a host for modding.

Awesome teardown, thanks for doing this!

BTW the drain in your light is much higher than mine, which is 3 mA on High, 80 µA on low, and 30 µA while off. Maybe the Anduril 2 version has something to do with it?

Also I found that removing the sheet under the optic doesn’t seem to affect the beam really, but it does allow the switch light to shine through the front which looks pretty cool.

They changed the USB-C controller I assume, because the new rev has new features - power bank, more power, etc.

Again, I am very suspicious of the USB-C controllers these guys use, and total lack of testing of the parasitic drain these things cause. Could be the designed usage of the part or the part itself, dunno.

3 mA is still bad though, very bad. Should be no more than 300 uA total with the switch LED on high.

Huh well you make a very interesting point there! The powerbank functionality seems a great function to me for a light that I always carry in my backpack, but if it’s empty before I can use it (even though I regularly check it) well what’s the use in that!

1 Thank

The TS21 uses the same controller chip the new EC06 uses, and the EC06 has high drain, and it has a flickering blue LED issue.... :FACEPALM:

The Injoinic IP5310 is the USB-C controller, datasheet PDF found here.

EC06:

TS21:

Side note, I suppose it would be quite easy (with the right hardware: hot air gun) to swap the two combi-LED’s right? I would prefer to have the orange LED on the button instead of the green one… I have a black TS21 on it’s way and the hardware is slightly different there I think in the case of the LED colors compared to the colored flashlights (those seem to have the LED colors already differently)

Pretty sure the Q8 Pro also uses the same chip then? Because mine’s blue LED also sometimes randomly turns on…

Hhmm, I guess should be fairly easy - I don't have any double LED's, got lots of singles in different colors. Wondering if the poor low output or high drain is the LED or the color amber, some how related to the drain.

Yikes! Wonder how the parasitic drain is - I don't have a Q8 Pro, got lots of Q8's though...

Neither do I, but I’m thinking to just swap the LED’s they used on the board, but I’m not entirely sure if the different voltages of the red/green/orange/blue LED are interchangeable with maybe different on-board current-limiting resistors…

Well the stock current limiting resistors are both 100 ohms, very low, should work with just about any color. You can see them here in this pic, the 0402's just below the LED's, below the switch, horizontal. The left one is covered over with red junk:

Hmm, I’ll try to give it a shot to measure that, I suppose I can power it with a bench-power supply at about 4.2v and have a low current measuring meter in between measuring leads that I press against the pads, since I can’t simply remove the back of the battery holder :innocent:

Ah yes I see them thanks! Yeah that gunk might cause a bit of trouble if I end up trying to swap the LED’s… I also wonder if it has an effect on the color the LED produces?

To measure drain, I just remove the battery tube, sit an 18650 batt+ on the batt+ brass ring, and use a DMM meter across the batt- to the ground ring: easy.

I carefully removed the red junk off the LED - dunno about it's effect because I swapped resistors in the process - 100 ohm to 8.2K, but only for the amber color.

Ah, yes good point, that’s also another way of doing it!

… and also for the blue LED then right? Because they are both in the same package and use the same current limiting resistor? Or are there two more resistors somewhere else on the board?

I believe 1 resistor is used for amber (1 side of each double LED), 1 resistor for Blue. I don't see separate resistors per LED, and each double LED acts as 2 distinct LED's, separate wiring, 4 connections.