I will be switching to the single sided drivers soon, but I decided to try my hand at designing my own. I don't think mine are as nice looking as Wight's (he's an Eagle wiz and is much smarter than I am!), but I think they'll work great and aesthetic tweaks will come in the future.
17mm
And a crazy 22mm
For 2S+ cells, this driver can be powered with a zener diode, or with an LDO regulator for lower parasitic drain if you're using it with a 2S+ e-switch setup (with the LDO installed you wouldn't use the D1 pad or zener diode). There is also a spot for an on-board temperature sensor. For normal use none of that stuff needs to be populated though, which is why they are marked "(opt.)", so it can just be used with the normal parts.
And this one is a beta, untested board, with the goal of staying single-sided, but also allowing for higher efficiency in the lower modes along with a really low moonlight mode, while maintaining direct drive for the higher modes. I think it will work, but I've just ordered 3 of these for now so I can test it and make revisions before releasing it.
I think that there is room for improvement on all of these, but they should all work great.
This. Exactly what I’ve been wanting for quite a while. As soon as this is available, sign me up!
FET, 1x7135, OTC, attiny13/25, and still just 17mm and one-sided!
Is there any chance you might use attiny25 on some of the drivers you build? As far as I can tell, the only drawbacks are no “picoPower” and a slightly higher price.
I believe he will, if I ever get my butt in gear and port the STAR firmware to the 25. But then with the built in temp sensing there will be a lot more code to write even though the current temp sensing program is most of the way there.
Hurry up PLEASE! Richard has had one of my full house modified M6 lights which he borrowed back for testing and I want it back one of these years. Been gone since Oct 8th so now over 2 months of experimentation and testing with it. Three other lights in his hands shipped the same time that I am waiting for too.
That has nothing to do with him. The code is ready for those lights and working--that's just me being overworked and behind on everything. I just haven't had the time to finish things up.
I had thought it was just a matter of recompiling, but I just tried and it failed. Apparently the attiny25 gcc settings don’t have a symbol for “WDTIE” (and possibly other things), so some low-level bits will need some minor changes. They’re so similar that I doubt it’ll be hard though.
If I had a driver to test on, I’d probably be a lot more motivated to get it working.
I’ll probably have an ATMega32u4 soonish to play with too, but it’s for totally different purposes.
Richard; Just trying to give a gentle nudge and I thought that JonnyC might be involved when he mentioned code for a temperature sensor. Rather have things right than rushed and I do appreciate your work.
USB SNES controller with accelerometer. It should be fun for emulators, and I can put extras in the firmware like per-button turbo and shake-the-controller-to-rewind-emulation-by-5-seconds. Maybe map other random stuff too, like tilting the thing sideways to adjust the emulation speed or tilting up/down to load/save the state.
Mostly, I just think it sounds like a fun project.
hey RMM, how tight is the heat shrink tubing over an 18650 before you shrink it? is it loose enough to fit some of the 24awg turnigy wire in with the battery?
And while we’re on the subject, I suspect that this modification is unnecessary: these batteries are “case negative” and have a positive pole in the center at one end. Presumably the goal of putting the 24AWG wire in place would be to get both positive and negative at one end. If a person was willing to modify the cell in order to do that then all they need to do is remove some of the heatshrink at the positive end.