I just received my rev2z boards. I won’t be able to get to rhem for a while but I will be watching this thread closely so that I might be able to get a working firmware to power one xpl hi on one channel and two Nichia 219 on the other. I will need another board to add some extra 7135s to the lone 7135 on top. We will see?
Thanks for making these boards by the way!
Unfortunately, most of these designs require traces to run under the 7135’s in order to make everything fit, not allowing room for a big ground pad.
I will be making one change to the board as soon as I can. The ground tab for the 7135’s on the back is essentially part of the ground ring, and when reflowing it tends to “suck” the 7135 all the way out to the edge. I’m going to get rid of the traditional ground ‘ring’ and just add exposed parts of the ring in between the 7135’s
For the firmware, I use BLF-A6 as a starting point for almost everything, so that’s what I would prefer it to be based on. It’s what I’m most familiar with. Essentially we would just need TK’s “TURBO” shortcut to turn Pin3 on instead of just go to ‘255’ on Pin6, and of course make sure the turbo timer still functions. I believe that’s exactly what pyro attempted to do, but I got a lot of compile errors, and the base FW looks weird to me, like it was an Attiny25 version or something. (I’m still stuck on 13a’s). The compile errors looked to be coming from parts of the FW that pyro hadn’t touched.
Ohh yes, I've seen that happen as well - the 7135's getting sucked outward.
Ok on the firmware - I got the boards and all the parts now, and have worked with BLF-A6 before. Just dunno when I can get to it unfortunately - still not over this being sick thing (over 3 weeks now). Yep, I'm not doing much on 13A's now though but still need to support them. I think the base BLF-A6 firmware is super tight in code space, so might not be do-able without losing something.
If something has to be lost, you could probably ditch one of the strobes, those are probably the least-used modes in blf-a6. Personally, I disable all of the hidden modes whenever I use it. I just like it for the easy control of the PWM channels, the two mode groups, and the memory toggle. I don’t really like overly complicated things for clicky lights. Even the multiple mode groups I usually just use to essentially toggle ‘moon’ on/off. I’m going to order some 45’s to use in my dual-switch lights though.
Sweet, hopefully I’ll have time to give it a shot tonight
That’s for ATtiny13A, right? I thought three outputs wouldn’t work on the t13, or one wouldn’t be able to reflash without a high voltage programming device, wasn’t there something like that?
What we have done is re-purpose pin3 that was originally used for config stars.
Now its just on or off which controls on or off for the FET for TURBO
Wow, that’s cool. I wonder why nobody hasn’t done this before…
Probably a few reasons:
I’ve made five channel drivers by putting the off time cap, voltage monitoring divider and the E-switch on the same pin. Nothing released though, still working on the 17mm version with four channels of AMCs and a FET on the fifth… and the five AMC channel driver in this light isn’t finished yet either: Custom dual switch driver finally seeing some light.
This board was made with the mindset of bringing some of the functionality of Mike’s driver and Dr Jones’ similar driver, while being more accessible and (hopefully) easier to adapt existing FW. Mike’s is kind of an all-in-one solution from what I understand, the FW and the driver are a package deal (or will be when released).
Either way, I didn’t really do anything revolutionary here.
I remember some Polish(?) guy made a PIC based driver that did about the same about a year ago, and was going to put a mini USB interface on it. I never saw if that project ever got finished. Anyhow, it was his driver and ideas that planted the seed in my head, but at the time I had no skills to make drivers. Anyone know if those drivers with mini USB interface ever became a reality? I’ve probably jumbled up a bunch of different people and projects, I don’t really remember.
If I’m hijacking the thread, let me know and I’ll shut up.
This is the one:
The OP hasn’t been online in over a year, it probably won’t ever happen. It would have been pretty freaking awesome honestly. I wish the pictures would load so I could see how it was laid out.
I think my earlier issues were due to me having no idea how to work with how TK has the new FW set-up (with .h files and such). So I took this and moved all of your changes over to an earlier version of blf-a6 that I can comprehend. Here is a diffcheck of what you posted on the left, and what I just threw together on the right.
I’m down to a final few errors.
About that, on the “nobody has done it before” theme… any idea why nobody has done software based PWM? Only because it has not been needed before? I understand the 13A has built-in PWM on two pins but from what I’ve seen of driver code, it spends most of its time idle so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to toggle any output pin on and off in a loop during that time. I haven’t thoroughly read the CPU’s specs so maybe there’s a catch but the way I see it, it should be possible to get some kind of PWM done on all pins.
This is where two errors come from:
#define TURBO // Convenience code for turbo modeThe code expects TURBO to have a value, like BATTCHECK, STROBE, etc defined just below it. It was 255 in the initial code and that will do fine.
You also need to #define FET_PIN to something. eg:
#define FET_PIN PB4If I followed everything correctly, which is uncertain given I'm overdue for some sleep :-) No guarantee it will work, I haven't read anything but the non compiling code.
Thanks for the help! I’m the opposite of a wizard at this stuff.
Minor point, but it would be better to use something like 245 for turbo instead of 255, so that 255 is still open to be used as a pwm value on the larger bank of 7135’s
I’ve read some of your posts around the forum and I think you’re a magician in what you do. Crazy good work! And I’d love beeing able to reflash my drivers directly in the light. When I said it hasn’t been doen before I meant three channels on a tiny13A. At least I don’t know of anything like that. In your other post, I think you confused PilotPTK with Bocian. Bocian was the guy that made that 105C-based tiny25V driver, he’s also admin of a polish flashlight forum, AFAIK. Threads of his can be found here and here.
Yes, I missed that subtlety as the original BLF A6 firmware mixes FET PWM values and mode IDs in the same array. So there turbo needs to be 255 as it is used both as an ID and as a PWM value. This new version with TURBO in the array is definitely clearer (should be used in MODESNx2 too, I think). You may not be a wizard but you’re not half bad either if you can pick this up.