The information is this (sorry, no good camera where I am to demonstrate):
There's a small piece of QTC glued in to the head of the flashlight in the positive connection terminal. As I twist the base and engage the plunger mechanism, the QTC is compressed and more and more current flows through the now-connected circuit, feeding the LED greater and greater current.
The thing to remember is that batteries do not push current, the LED pulls it. At minimal brightness, there will be minimal current draw.
uhm.... Sorta. The Fv of the LED drops with current rather slowly, so the LED is actually drawing very little current at a slightly lower voltage. Yes, the QTC is dissapating some energy, but its quite trivial.
There's not really much to show - it's essentially a dark grey/black 4mm square of squishy rubber material. I got a couple of spares from Don here on the forums.
Or I could send you a few pills of the stuff to play with. It is cheap but there is a rather large minimum order of the stuff so I had to buy about 70 of the pills. From memory the pills are around 35 cents each and they weigh next to nothing so postage will be cheap.
While it isn't 100% efficient, it is operating more or less as a tap here, passing only so much current depending on how squished it is. When it is unsquished it has a very high resistance and as you compress it the resistance falls.
I doubt it'd work well in high power applications, the heat has to be dissipated inside a 4x4x2mm chunk of rubbery stuff.
Don, if you have a few extra, I'd love to buy a few off of you. I've been wanting to experiment with that stuff for awhile now, but have had too many irons in the fire lately.
The glue turned out to be a bad idea, as I ripped one piece because of the constant friction. Right now the QTC piece I have in my E07 is just being held in place by the friction of the battery. The E07 has polarity protection in the form of a small cavity in the pill where the positive post of the battery goes - it seems to work well enough.
I'll have to think up a sandwich-type holder for the tail section.
A couple of thin 14-14.8mm conductive discs sandwiching it would be the best bet. I've tried various coins with no success. The material is very soft.
Looking at a UK 5 pence coin, it is a little too large, but close enough I can file it and is thinner than the pill. A 4mm hole in the middle of that might work.
This is just thinking at the keyboard which I was always taught in my Computer Science classes thirty years ago was a Very Bad Thing To Do.
Unless my E07 is unusual, there should be a foam spacing ring at the bottom of the battery tube that keeps the battery from touching the -ve contact when you twist the tail into the locked position. I figure one of these QTC pills would stay put a little better if you were to put it into that ring rather than at the +ve button. It also wouldn't be subject to the head's twisting action if it were glued down there.
Yeah, my E07 doesn't have the foam ring either or that's the route I would've gone. As it is I use the tail lockout switch to turn the light on and off instead of the head. Doing it this way also shields the QTC pill from twisting action. It's the compression force of the battery that causes the friction problem.