I have made them with both sizes of LED’s. I think technically it is designed for 0805’s. If nobody answers with authority I can measure the pads tonight. Might check the info in the thread, should be in the section that introduces the board.
All boards are designed for 0805 except the crazy looking one
Thank you! Now I will order some 0805 leds for it.
A verson with 1206 LED pads was requested so here it is:
Yesterday I made a lighted tailcap on a Convoy S2+ shorty that has a triple Nichia 219B red emitters, I used red leds for the tail of course. It proved useful today already when supervising a photograpy school project in a dark room (a blinded class room), I could find the red flashlight back immediately all the time :-) .
What is new (to me at least) is that I did not use a transparant tailcap but a red one, it is fairly translucent for red light. Here it is by daylight:
parts list:
-Qlite driver from intl-outdoor link
-0805-size bleeder resistor of 470 Ohm on the Qlite (without the resistor everything goes wrong with the UI)
-PD68's dumb 16mm tail washer circuit board with 3 pairs of 2, makes 6 led pads link
-3x 5.7 kOhm 0805-size resistors before the 3 strings of 2 leds
-6x 0603 size red leds from Fasttech link
-16mm red tailcap from kaidomain link
With these resistor values and leds, the Qlite's behaviour is entirely normal. The lighted tail draws 1.02 mA, so will empty the Sanyo 18500 cell in between two and three months. The light is clearly visible in the dark at a distance without being too present, a good locator brightness. The entire tailcap is very evenly illuminated, thanks to the red tailcap that diffuses the light more than the transparant one.
Crazy idea, would it be possible to add a photoelectric sensor in the tail, something like this ?
Run time could possibly be extended as then we’d only need to run the tail LEDs when ambient light drops below a certain level. Just a thought :).
That would be interesting, certainly. Other than the problem of available space, the cost is prohibitive. We would have to buy 3,000 of them.
Well that one is available from Mouser in qty 1 @ €1.7, but there could be better/simpler options for the same task.
Exactly - I’m almost certain that’s not the perfect sensor to use, but the idea may have merit for someone more clever on this than me.
Looks awesome djozz! What firmware are you using on the driver and where does the bleeder go? Did you put the bleeder on C1?
I first tried it without bleeder and that messed up the user interface bigtime. I had soldered the driver in thoroughly to heatsink the 7135 chips (they have to burn up almost 2V overhead voltage in red led flashlights), so the bleeder on the led side of the driver was no option anymore. I had soldered the 4th star of the (stock firmware) Qlite to ground (mode group 4) and that trace goes quite far to the middle, with scratching off some solder mask I could solder a 0805 resistor from that trace to the central batt+ pad
I’ve ran into this project in a thread here, and it looks like it could be adapted for tailcap. In a nutshell, guy is running Luxeon Z from CR2032 with more than a year of runtime (26.3 μA draw), for the same reasons as us. I will try to make more sense of it, all of the source is available.
That’s an interesting idea. How would a low sensor reading trigger LED activation?
I’m wondering because an attiny13 could do it, but… the ADC parts of the chip use more power than simply leaving the LED on all the time at a low level. I guess it could keep everything off most of the time though, waking up once per second to take a reading and then go back to sleep.
I wonder if it’s possible to get the light sensor and tail LEDs in different frequencies so the LEDs won’t make it think it’s in a bright place.
Where did ya get that triple nichia 219b red emitter ? 
Havent even found triple red ….
I bought them at Lumitronics ( leds.de ). But I tested them a bit under the performance of the red XP-E2.
Hi pilotdog68, could you possibly do a version of rev5.1 for 14mm boots that uses (4) 1206 LEDs and only (1) resistor on the back? If there isn’t room to do 1206 LEDs, could you do 0805 LEDs instead?
Today I made a S2+ 18500 shorty with illuminated tailcap. (some more details perhaps tomorrow in the what did you mod today thread)
driver: Qlite revA with Nlite firmware (from MtnE)
bleeder: 470 Ohm
ledboard: pilotdog68’s dumb 16mm 6-led ring with a resistor for 3 times two pairs
leds: from a bag with random blue/cyan/green mix 0603-size from ebay
resistors before leds: 2 pairs of 6.7KOhm, 1 pair 1.8kOhm (tweeked)
current through tailcap: 131 micro-amp (so 1.8 year on a NCR18500A)
The light is well visible in the dark but not overly bright. The driver UI suffered somewhat from the lighted tail, every half-press gets you to low again, so you have to go through the cycle starting from low every time you change mode (not too annoying with 4 modes)
Hello friends. I order a few boards a while back and have just picked them up to attempt my first lighted Tailcap. I ordered 16mm and 14mm rev5 boards. The 16mm boards look fine, but am I missing something on the 14mm board? I can’t find the ground plane. The trace for the neg pad of the LEDs goes to the end of the board and it appears as if the board was cut short. I’m a little confused, please help.
You are absolutely right… They cut it way to short…