Convoy T3 Deep Red

I asked Simon on the convoy thread if you could put a deep red sst-20 led in the T3 as long as you didn’t use a 14500 battery. He said the driver wasn’t compatible. So naturally I ordered a T3 and some deep red LEDs and did it anyway.

And Simon was right. Sort of.

The light works, and I don’t think it will burn out the led, it’s pretty bright but doesn’t seem to get hot too quickly. I haven’t done long runs yet, but it seems fine.

What doesn’t work is the low modes. The lowest modes look like about 35 percent output. If I use the 1-10-35-100 group it looks like its 35-35-35-100.

It’s still a nice light on the 20-100 group though.

Next I’m going to try the Sofirn SP10 pro with a deep red led, hopefully the low modes work on that one.

Weird. Must be a VF thing since T3 has a boost driver.

FWIW, I think it used a 17mm driver so I think you could buy the 5-group 2.5A 17mm driver sells specifically for that LED, then use a 14500 cell and it should work great.

Also FWIW, I’m using an 8x7135 driver in my C8+ with Osram Red, so if you can get that to fit in a T2 (there may be clearance issues with the 7135’s, not sure) I imagine it’ll work just fine too with a 14500. I wanted the 12 group firmware and it’s working great.

I swapped out the led in my sofirn SP10 pro for a deep red and it works perfectly on AA batteries. Definitely going to keep that one, I may change the convoy back to the original.

super helpful info

I put a red LED in a Maratac, and lost the lowest mode… had been wondering if the Anduril driver would retain the low modes, and am really glad to hear it does.

Congrats on your Red mods and thanks for sharing your results.

You could also try to swap out the T3 driver with a Convoy AA driver for ni-mh or alkaline AA battery ,max output current 800mA.

Now there is a T3 offered with sst-20-dr and an appropriate driver: https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805236022494.html

The description says

Mode: AA battery(50mA low - 0.35A mid - 1.7A high), 14500 battery (25mA low - 0.6A mid - 2A high)

Those might be based on 2.0 or 2.5 volts. Either way it appears to be a different driver.