D.I.Y. Illuminated tailcap

Board price is $2-2.50 for 3 boards, free shipping.

I did no cutting to any of the hosts.

I still want to do these, and I ordered the boards a few months ago, but they never arrived . I will have another go with these now :-)

Edit: ordered, thanks for the update pd68!

Are these boards on RBD's Oshpark thread? If not it would be good to get RBD to add a link there in his OP. I'm going to order a few just for the smaller diameter. Thanks.

I have my parts coming in for a couple of these switches. It looks like a fun project!
I’ve never soldered SMD’s before, so that will be a challenge.

Already an update, the resistors and switches came in from Fastech. Oshpark should be shipping my boards by early next week.

I’m sure I will have questions, if you peoples don’t mind.

My boards just showed up. I'm just waiting on the SMD LEDs now.

Hmm, I can't seem to insert any images today. Will try again soon.

Edit: I think I figured it out.

Good deal

Long ago I ordered these boards before but they never arrived. A few weeks ago I ordered them again few days ago they arrived.

First try on a Supfire S1, I first took out the stock switch which is a different design, I had to add a ring in between the new switch and silicon cover, had to do that anyway because it was to be white plastic for the red led-light to get through, the tailcap was replaced by a transparant one, the pillar was shortened. The brass switch retaining ring is very thick in the Supfire S1, so I had to ream the inside quite a bit to get it clear from the center pad of the pd68 switch board. The new switch was this one, started with testing some resistor values, ended up with 5.6KOhm on the switch board, 680 Ohm bleeder on the driver. The new design board allowed two leds in parallel :-)

The careful observer will see that in this picture the leds are the wrong way around, they exploded during testing. Actually during testing I blew six of these tiny leds. That will not happen again because now I now know how to do it right.

For the bleeder resistor I drilled a shallow hole in between the batt+ pad and ground ring, so that the resistor was plane with the surface after soldering.

Neat result :-) . I am going to mod this light further (the head is still stock apart from the bleeder R), but this is a nice start. 4V, 6kOhm is 0.65mA, so a 550mA Efest should last about 34 days. I charge it more often than that so that's ok!

Thanks pd68 for the ideas and board, this is a nice little upgrade and a good excuse to fiddle around without having to start on the big hobby-projects that I dread starting, like the DIY contest entry. :sad:

Perhaps as a small improvement, the solder pads for the switch may better not go all the way to the edge but stop a tiny bit from the edge, then there's no chance for them to short against the side of the tail section

That’s pretty fancy, well done pilotdog68! It’s funny that the ingenuity comes more from BLF than from the commercial manufacturers. :smiley:

Did you contact oshpark about the missing ones? I presume you also had to pay shipping since you’re not in the usa.

I had thought about that the last time I revised one. Ultimately I had never had a problem with them shorting so I left them all the way to the edge. Shouldn’t be too hard to change that though.

Also, the center pad I left the same size as on the 20mm board so it would be easy to fit a normal sized spring. Do you think I should make it smaller? Or was it juat problematic because of the larger retaining ring?

I’m going to order some of these fairly soon, planning to get a 18350 tube light with Nichia 219 with a good moon light mode and this tail light so its easily found. :slight_smile:

No, the Supfire S1 has a quite idiotic and heavy brass retaining ring, haven't seen anything like that.

Djozz, how were the pads size for soldering? They are smaller than on the larger board because I wanted to leave clearance in case the board had to be trimmed. Do you think that was a smart move, or would you have preferred bigger pads?

The pads for the smd thingies were fine for me, I do not think larger pads would make it that much easier. I do have a very fine pointy tip on my solder iron though..

And on second thoughts I think it does help if the center pad for the spring is a bit smaller, it is 11mm now, 10 or even 9mm would be better, most springs are less than 10mm.

ok, here is the 17mm Rev2 board (thanks to Djozz for beta testing :wink: )

>>>> Newer version in post #263

Changes:

- Spring pad changed from ~11mm to 10mm.

- Tiny setback from edge for Batt- Switch pad

  • rearranged pads and enlarged resistor pads to make swapping resistors a bit easier (for myself).

Nice improvements! I have two of the last version left, when they are used I will order the new version :-)

Off topic: my girlfriend being away this evening, I finished the Supfire S1 mod:

*sloppy dedomed but fully working Nichia 219C 83CRI on Noctigon

*NanjgAK-47-A1 driver modded with FET (so direct drive) 5%-25%-100% with memory

*reshaped the led retaining ring for optimal focus and to stop blocking light

*tail spring bypassed, stock switch assembly replaced by small Omten on pd68's 17mm board (had to sand it back to 16.5mm to make it fit)

*and of course pd68's colour led tail mod :-)

It is doing 800lm at startup, 600lm after 30seconds. Light is high quality 4000K-ish. Throw is 9.3 kcd which is pretty good for a 18mm OP reflector. On high I have to step down after 30 seconds because it gets too hot to hold.

Wow, I didn’t recognize the 219c without its dome. Quite a little barn burner you have there.

It was my second and last attempt at hot dedoming the 219C: after the dome broke off halfway I started breaking away and slicing with the scalpel until a thin but messy layer was leftover on the die, and then I cut away all the silicone on the sides, including the white stuff, leaving the gold-coloured underground exposed. It works fine though

I just ordered some blue smd 805 leds and now I was thinking of using one blue and one red led. The blue one would switch off under 3.2V, with the red one still going, sort of lowish voltage indication, as discussed before. I can easily hack that onto the existing board (will do that), but it can also be build in. This would need a extra resistor pad on the circuit board so that the two leds can have their own resistor. The long middle trace could be left there to keep the possibilty of the parallel leds, and just needs cutting if two separate led circuits are used.