Slewflash - on high it heats up pretty fast, becoming very hot to the touch at around 5-6 minutes. The fins around the driver section get hot first, but pretty quickly the heat travels down the handle. The reflector is a huge chunk of aluminium screwed into the body, so Iād have to say the torch handles heat pretty well. Iām yet to experience the driver throttling back due to being too hot.
Theres some OUTSTANDING thermal and power analysis on this driver in the TR-J12 in this thread hereā¦
It starts out drawing 88W (!!) at 12.5Vin for the first ~60 seconds, then power consumption drops to 25-32W for the rest of the run.
I'm looking forward to your photos. Just remember that anything that burns up or blows up is replaceable (in the flashlight that is). I have just built a JM05 running 5 amps and keep a fire extinguisher handy. Seriously though very interesting.
I wonder why these drivers do such a thing, and the drop is it due to thermal regulation. Maybe someone can do that IR thermal scan on the components.
88W is not good for 5 LEDs definitely, it is worse than the DRY plus the immediate thermal mass is still in the DRY league. Luckily there is no strobe functionā¦ā¦ If there is then the LEDs could fail very fast. I killed 3 this way. (the one which started it all, Sky Ray SR3800, which in my copy with the DRY driver it has much lower resistance so can quite a bit more current than the DRY).
In the DRY, you might measure 4A at the tail in steady state modes, but in strobe it goes much higher. Seems like the batteries are not taxed and can provide much more current during the ON state. Of coz thatās the early 3-mode driver. Luckily this new 5-LED driver excluded the strobe mode, else it might be the same.
I am 99% sure all discussion and analysis in that thread was regarding the 5-LED driver in a modded TRJ12ā¦ at least no one indicated anything otherwise.
I have not used it for that long on 75% mode so I donāt know. I tend to use 50% or lower for long runtimes (- even 5% is adequate to be honest) and the ābig boy modesā (75-100% of course) forā¦ ahem ā¦ impressing people/dominating large areas/arousing attention from neighbours several houses away
youve got me hooked, i just ordered a driver for my trj12 from KD
for $20 cant go wrong
for anyone interested edcplus is carrying 3.7ah 26650 cells for $15 a piece. A little expensive, but a good reliable us source. I picked up 3 for the new driver. They are rated at 10a discharge rate (20a max continuous)
i wonder if the 7led driver in the x100 would get too hot lol ā¦ someone is bound to try it
I did the same damn thing, separated the boards on accident, I dropped it and pulled the pad off on one of the spots, exactly like yours. How did you resolder it and fix it?
Itās so easy to do, isnāt it! Just ensure that you make at least one red-to-red and one blue-to-blue connection (see the photo) between the boards by soldering a small amount of 18-20 AWG wire between them. I also pulled out the pins that attach the two boards with pliers also, and just soldered the contacts at the bottom. Donāt worry if the spots come off, just solder to the nearest available contact point that was touching. Good luck.
Got mine done, only pulling ~3.5 A on high, so probably messed up somewhere, lol. Gonna talk to E1320 about sending it to him to fix all my mess ups, lol.
Does that equate to 3.5A per LED or 3.5A divvied up between all 5 of them (my electrical knowledge is sorely lackingā¦)? How is the output on high looking? How many/ which cells are you using?
Looks about equivalent to what it was before. Meh, if I have a light as bright as before with more modes and no noticeable PWM I am still mostly happy.
Yup itās a really easy job, just find a tutorial online and you should be fine. The hardest bit is making the solder braid stick to the middle of the driver board.