Everybody is by now familiar with the magnificent Dollar Tree (where everything costs a buck) Lampe de Poche (Review: Dollar Tree Flashlight (Lampe de Poche)). The other day I stopped by a Dollar Tree looking for a new Poche, but, sadly they had none. :_(
What they did have was the extraordinary Luminare de Contact DEL. It’s one of those push-on push-off little hockey puck lights with peel and stick tape on the back. It uses 3 x AAA batteries and, stock, has 3x5mm white-ish LEDS that put out a whopping 4.3 lumens!
Well, we can do better than that! I opened it up (it’s just press fit together) and examined the “driver”. Just a single current limiting resistor. The switch is a small push-on push-off button switch. Well, out goes the resistor and LEDs and in goes a jumper wire and three CREE XLAMP-7090’s (in parallel). I sanded the bottoms of the reflector wells to remove the plating so the LEDs would not short out and super-glued the LEDs to the reflectors (super glue was also from Dollar Tree, three tubes for, you guessed it, a buck.
The result… 80 lumens of puckalicious floodalicious whitealicious lightaliciousness:
The reflector disk flexes to allow the switch to be pushed. It would be nice to add some silicon carbide epoxy around the LEDs for better heatsinking, but that would probably muck up the action. We’ll see how it holds up. Each LED is being driven with around 1 watt. XLAMP-7090’s are the first gen XR-E LEDs and are rather inefficient… Real XR-E’s would at least double the output, but does one really need a hockey puck that puts out that much light? Besides, them things cost money.
No need for super-glue. It comes with double sticky tape on the back!
But I don’t like blinky modes. It would beacon/SOS/strobe when I banged my head against the wall.
Could be an interesting feedback loop when the head banging caused seizures which caused more head banging which caused more… hmmm, back in a minute… gotta try something. J)
I had this sitting on a table and a friend picked it up, looked right at it, and pushed the top. SURPRISE! It’s over 20 times brighter than your basic hockey puck. I think that he is still seeing three spots wherever he looks.
It only fumes as it sets. I didn’t get any haze on the reflectors, but who cares if it does… just call it a diffuser film. On a couple of other Lampe de Poches mods I got a little haze, but it wiped off without a trace.