Mod - GarryBunk's SecurityIng HD-016 (It's Finally Done!) - Pic Heavy

Subscribed. Looking forward to see into what this HD-016 will turn to. Had a lot of discussion with Garry about modes it should use. I'm glad he took my suggestions into account. I'm MTB-er too .

May I suggest to try out also another solution for throw part where deeper reflector resides. I would add another cooper disc to elevate the led so that 21mm LED-DNA 10deg TIR lenses would fit instead of the reflector. This would make throw beam much nicer and smotther (no ringy beam anymore). If it was me (and could do it) I would grind down also the other part in order to install 25deg TIR lense.

I've used 10+25 deg. LED-DNA lenses with clone of MJ-880 and it gives really nice beam. If you want it wider just replace one lense with 45deg. Just my opinion from my experience.

Subscribed for sure

Hmm . . . interesting idea. It would look awful funny having one TIR and the other a reflector. And I don't remember the 45 degree (or even 60 degree) showing as wide of a flood as this light does from that flood reflector. Also, I didn't notice rings in the beam or at least they didn't bother me.

I'm proud to have such a great group of people involved in this light build. I certainly could not have done it myself!

-Garry

ImA4Wheelr, changed my avatar to something that is somewhat more visible.

I just received this light from ImA with the custom firmware installed in order to test it. Couldn’t wait, so I didn't . I pulled the 18650 from my EDC (old Sanyo 18650 laptop pull), dropped it in, and gave it a whirl. I have to say “I LOVE IT!!!!” Timing seems great! The press-n-hold 2 seconds to turn off or access strobe (which is only accessed from off) feels perfect! Mode spacing appears good (shining under my desk at work), but I’ll give it a better review when it gets dark out. The strobe timing seems good. It's a slower beacon type strobe which is definitely not seizure inducing like so many lights.

Thanks ToyKeeper for such an awesome firmware and thanks ImA4Wheelr for giving it a good home! (Now excuse me while I crawl back under my desk and go back to playing with the light :) .)

-Garry

Garry, nice to hear you are satisfied. Can you tell what spacing exactly have you choose to set in this sample?

My desired modes are: Low (10%-15%), Medium (40%), High (75%), Turbo (100%) with turbo step down to "high" after +/- 90secs. ImA will be adjusting the firmware to hit levels close to my goals. I wanted a low that wasn't anything like "moonlight" and was enough to leave on while stopped to light up the surroundings. Turbo is intended as generating heat than the small light body can handle (this is really just a guess) but for those times that you just want a quick boost to see just past the fringes of "high". High at +/- 75% should be around 2.0A per emitter and likely at the limit of heat the body can handle, while yet still providing pretty good runtime on an 8.4v 5200mAh battery pack.

The U.I. is as follows:

Blinks once when the light receives power, just to let you know it’s connected.

From off:
Short click for low.
Long press (2 seconds) for strobe.


While on:
Short click to increase brightness by one level. Loops from turbo back to low, bypassing “off”. If in strobe, short press goes to high.
Long press (2 seconds) to turn light off.

Strobe timing: 4Hz, 20% duty cycle

My intention was to have "Off" and "Strobe" only accessible intentionally so that a cyclist is never left in the dark, nor accessing stobe while riding.

Whether or not the battery monitoring will work is up in the air. I don't expect it will, but having it work will just be icing on the cake!

Oh, and I should have also given thanks to ledoman for giving me input and feedback on this U.I. and mode levels. And without his review I probably wouldn't have bought this light in the first place.

-Garry

nice, can’t wait to see the beamshots.

Too bad that’s all those things are good for right now. :wink: Maybe I should get back to that project.

The big plans in the OP sound good.

Sorry I haven't been around folks. Been busy gathering info from the driver lately. It seems pretty sophisticated. Has a lot of stuff going having 2 buck drivers and 3 voltage indicator leds. Good news is I think there may be 2 voltage divider circuits. I've taken snap shots of as many traces as I can get and have recorded some voltage readings relative to Ground. I need to get more readings and also at a different voltage level for some. It appears that the pinout for the MCU might be quite different from my X2. Can't definitively say at this point.

Still have ways to go to get all the pieces fitting together in my mind. Being hampered by traces disappearing under components. It appears the critical traces I need to see are under the switch. Problem is, I can't just unsolder it from the driver to see. It's a big switch that has big pins/legs in every quadrant of the base board. I would need to heat the whole thing to remove it. Given the 3-dimensional nature of the driver and weight of some of the components, the driver would probably partially fall apart in the process.

I think it's a good thing that Garry only wants to do a modest increase in current to the emitters. The inductors on this driver are pretty small. Also, each driver has only one large diode per inductor. The X2 has 2 for the one inductor.

Anyway. I have more work to do and it will probably take me a few days before I can post a coherent report on the driver. But, that's the hard part. Once understood, the mod is the easy part.

The heat sinking mod is on hold while we sort out the AR coated lens Garry wants to use. The stock lenses are 1mm thick. He may be going with a 1.5mm thick lens. That will impact the pill as it's the only place that can realistically be adjusted to accommodate the thicker glass.

I'll report back when I have some good progress or coherent information.

Gonna park some driver pics here for folks in the future that may be interested in modding this driver.

Two buck drivers. Large diodes labeled "SS34", Inductors "100", Sense Resistors "R150", Buck Controllers "LEDA 1406",

Here's a couple, much better pics. These are of Ledoman’s HD-016 driver from his review (Post#13).

Where most the action will take place:

The 3 pads with long traces going off to the right go to each of the 3 voltage indicator LED's.

The big trace in the center is B+ and connect to the 2 inductors. The biggish traces on each side are the other side of the inductors and also connect to the LED+.

Need to redo this one below.

Switch and voltage indicator LED's side of driver.

Those back lit photos are great for trace finding, niiice.

ImA4Wheelr, two better pictures (non backlited) are mine from the review.

^ Opps. You're correct. Garry even told me that when he included them in a PM. Sorry. Correcting post right now

No problem, it's just to be correct. :-)

Oops, looks like a different firmware will be needed. I didn’t know this thing had battery indicator lights.

Then again, if it’s running on 2x18650 in series, I don’t think I can measure the voltage anyway. We’ll see.

Hi ToyKeeper. The driver appears to have 2 different voltage dividers (Still trying to sort out). One MCU pin pad reads close to 1.5 volts and another at about 1 volt with fully charged cells. I don't have exact numbers here at work. I also need to measure with different input voltage levels. I can adjust the values in the FW as needed. I don't know of anyone pulling this off yet though. I just know the theory the wight taught me.

Yeah, I set those a tad bit different than requested. They’re actually about 1.6, 12, 46, and 100. But after adjusting the values on a visually-linear cube root scale with a maximum of about 1600 lumens, the resulting “perceptual” percentages are 25, 50, 77, and 100.

The low end may be a bit off since I’m not totally sure where “zero” is on this hardware, but I’m guessing it’s at about PWM=6/255.

That sounds like it’ll probably take a lot of trial and error, manually checking lots of different values and reflashing. And that’s if it works at all. It might deliver a constant voltage due to the buck driver, and it could possibly be too low to measure accurately (the attiny13a’s reference voltage is 1.1V). In any case, it likely won’t be easy.

ImA4Wheelr, did you measure both of those voltages as changing with different Vbat? Just based on what you wrote I’d expect that one of those two voltages was probably a reference voltage to compare the other voltage against. (If so, the ATtiny13A will not need that.)

I think that the easiest course of action is simply to make up a new voltage divider and work with what we know.