BLF Kronos X6/X5 GB - Group Buy now closed.

BLF Special Edition Products
5122

Picked up my SS/CU set #128 box #128

Box had small damage on all 4 corners as others have reported.
A little foam around the ends of the box would have prevented this damage.

No damage to the lights from shipping other than the lights were out of their slots.
A piece of foam inside the box would have kept the lights in place.

Lights look GREAT, no shipping damage and all machine work is very good.

So for me this was a great GB and I am very pleased.

Have not had time to work on the UI but will this weekend.

Thanks for all the time and effort put into this GB by everyone involved :slight_smile:

One last thing to add that in the next GB for the UI could we make it have respond to “Voice Commands”

At this moment I can hear the sound of a wireless mouse aimed at my head from the deak of TK

5123

The blue light thang is pretty well documented.

From the Harvard Medical School web site:

Your mileage may vary, past performance is not an indicator of future earnings, yada yada yada.

5124

Guess maybe things are not always as they appear then. I wonder how many millions of people Harvard studied for they’re research? Results are always skewed by the data presented. Wonder too about all the hundreds of thousands (more?) of people that work the night shift, sleep in the daytime. Or that live in constantly illuminated cities, like NYC or Vegas. In spite of all that’s bad for us, people are living longer than ever before. Amazing, when you think about it.

Copper makes your hands stink, uh, quite the contrary. Your hands make copper stink! I have recently found out that it’s the breakdown of your body oils on the metal that produces the smell, the copper itself doesn’t smell. I also have it on good authority that the use of Tellurium Copper eliminates this aspect of handling a copper product.

If a diamond is the most electrically conductive material on earth, would it benefit a modder to use a 12 mm simulated diamond as a heat sink? (about 6 carats, $108) If it failed to help a modified flashlight run cool, would the wife wear a 6 carat diamond (sim) ring?

Probably no one would guess that I drink coffee in a 30 oz mug.

5125

Received mine today.

All I can say is Thankyou to Kronos, Bugsy and all others involved.

The lights are stunning, none of the amazing pictures even come close to doing these things justice once you get them in hand.

Please please don’t be put off by any negative comments, the finished product is a special achievement

5126

So…ah…ya…my comment about the brightness of the tail cap was merely an observation.

5127

I’d appreciate a pointer when someone comes up with ways to change the tailcap LED.

The Harvard page cited above is a good introduction, if you want one.

Your Melatonin May Vary.
No one person’s experience is the whole truth about how the world works.
Science finds what personal experience and anecdotes fail to discover.
Detailed recordkeeping over time reveals what individual experience fails to discover.
Your experience differs. Other people are not wrong when their report differs.

Your Opinion May Vary,
Contents May Have Settled,
Only White Male Subjects Tested This Drug,
No Immediate and Acute Danger to Human Life …

5128

Hate to interrupt, but just fyi for those modders/techies interested --

The driver in these lights is effectively a "FET+1" driver, but enhanced by using a more advanced Atmel MCU: ATTiny25 instead of the usual ATTiny13A, like in the BLF A6 lights. The extra memory and temperature sensor built in to the "25" allowed us (ahhh TK) to write more advanced firmware than what we had in the BLF A6.

For the cap on these drivers, we've been using 10 uF cap since the beginning for all our custom drivers, FET or linear regulated. We've seen problems on "25" drivers with high amps and I found that doubling up on the cap, 20 uF effectively, eliminated the flaky problem. So I pulled off the C1 cap on one of these new light drivers and tested it -- it appears to be a 12 uF cap as best as I can tell.

So the bump from 10 uF to 12 uF appeared to solve the problems the manufacturer was having originally on this driver. Kind of makes sense - proably best to keep the cap as small as possible, but still allowing the driver/MCU to function properly.

5129

Not meaning to be at odds, really. I just don’t understand why/how things are happening to you as a noob that haven’t/don’t happen to anyone else. I have no idea what you’re seeing over there across the pond, want to understand, try to understand, if for no other reason than to try to keep it from happening to ME! :stuck_out_tongue:

The reflector and lens fogging could be from something in the thermal paste used heating up and vaporizing. I don’t know. I know the paste used on mine is grey and sort of watery, and very little of it, so I’m cleaning it off and using Arctic Alumina Thermal Paste.

I’m gonna talk to my new buds that make simulated diamonds and see if I can get a disc instead of a faceted cut stone. :wink: Sells by the carat, regardless of cut, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be accommodating. :slight_smile: First I have to financially recover from all these group buys and replacing the engagement ring my wife “lost”. I knew once I put down the money on a replacement, the original would get jealous and rear it’s head… yep, found the lost engagement ring, the new one is being made as we speak. Go figure.

Science named our planets. Science then decided one was just a rock. So every kid that went to school was told we had 9 planets in our Solar System. Then they decided to downsize one, after the fact, and now we have “8” planets. There’s Science for you, always changing, adapting to the new data coming in. So, is anything actual, matter of factual? Or do the scientists simply shift and adapt at will as new things are discovered? Eggs are good for you. No, wait! Eggs are bad for you! Uh, hold that thought, eggs are good for you again unless you have cholesterol problems. How are we ever to really know what’s what?

How many people are on Earth? How many people were in Harvard’s sleep experiment? So the data is based on a minuscule percentage of available test subjects? Once again, subject to change. So, what IS normal? It’s a misleading concept.

Not very long ago, normal was a nicely made flashlight with all the goodies glued inside, no access. :wink: Not so very long ago, normal was 100 lumens. (Surefire still believes in this, by the way… both the glue and the weak lumens high price concept)

Science learns of a lot of really cool and essential stuff. The guys/gals at myth busters blow most of it up. :wink:

5130

Thanks Tom, now I’m wondering if they substituted for the OTC as well…

5131

I posted about my experience swapping these in comment 5156. Happy to answer questions if I can but you’d probably get better answer from PD and the rest of the guys in the lighted tailcap thread.

Slightly better shot of my modded tailcaps:

5132

Yeah, diamond is actually an insulator, not electrically conductive at all, but great thermal conductivity. Basically you could coat whole drivers or such with it, if you can afford.

I have had some “milky/cloudy” lenses in 5 Convoy L2’s and just couldn’t get rid of it. Tried pure water, water with dishwashing detergent, glass cleaner and ethyl alcohol… What else could I try? Don’t want to pay 20$ with shipping for an UCLp lens…

5133

Sharpie, that optics cleaner that you’re using, do you have a link for me, please? thx

5134

It takes a village ...

5135

Here we call that doubt, venom is MUCH stronger. When one person continually has inexplicable issues with items that many have in hand and no one else is reporting such issues, calling BS is highly called for.

And come on, if that UK manufacturer had the BEST bench-rest actions in the world he would NOT have shown up with JUNK! A flashlight tail cap is hardly a rifle action, tolerances are not even in the same ball park. No pressure to speak of to induce this galling effect that grabs and seizes. My gunsmith friend knew better, back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, and he was just a small town kid that went to college and learned how to build guns for a living. So yeah, face to face with the guy that built these “exquisite locked up pieces of crap” I’d call BullShi*. I’m not saying this guy can’t build a good weapon, but he failed miserably in more ways than one when he showed up to a trade show with untested freshly machined parts that seized.

There is a game played where a story is told, the players can buy into the story or call Bull Shi*, if they call and the story was legit, there’s a price to pay in the game. Calling BS is not venomous, not lethal by any stretch of the imagination… it’s merely expressing doubt based on experience. Putting the ball in your court, as it were, placing provenance on you… the originator of the statements in question.

When/if the other 398 holders of these SS X6’s speak up on the galling issue, we’ll then have all the data.

5136

So i got my lights and the quality is great, there heavy as hell the light in the tail is cool. my serial numbers dont match and mine are above 253. i have 331 on the x5 and 356 on the x6. the beam on my x5 was good but idk whats the deal with the x6. the led is so badly centered its not even funny. so bad that i dont have a clear hotspot. is bad. and because the reflector screws in i cant do any adjustments. kinda sucks. is anyone checking the beam on these when they are made? im pretty dissapointed about the beam

5137

I don’t mean to be pushy or rude when I ask this, so I apologize in advance if it comes out that way:

What’s the estimated amount of time left for people who haven’t used their codes, to use them? So the wailisted people can get theirs?

Seeing all the great posts on this set is making me pretty desperate to get my own. Haha

5138

I’m glad I’m not your doctor or accountant, that’s the solipsist question nobody else can answer for you (grin).

Seriously, there’s much newly known about how the body clocks work, and why blue light regulates the body clocks, that you’d likely find informs what you do.
A couple of recent examples found with Google Scholar:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07420528.2015.1119158
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3109/07420528.2015.1108980

Not asking you to think your own experience is wrong.
Just asking you to consider that other people’s reports aren’t wrong when they differ from your experience.

5139

Thank you, Sharpie.

5140

Someone posted earlier that if you remove the reflector, the 2 screws holding the board down can be loosened and the position of the LED can be slightly adjusted before re-tightening the 2 screws. Not a lot of slack to play with but it might fix/improve you situation.

5141

Wonderful video, and story. Really enjoyed it Jack, thanks for posting! After watching it, I long to be a part of their ‘community.’