What did you mod today?

I tried four switches, all brand new. One S2 metal boot, two S2 rubber boot, and one non convoy fwd. clicky. I’m not worried about the sensitivity, I’m more concerned about why it keeps losing modes one at a time until there is just white left.
I’m really starting to think that there is something about those Luxeon Z emitters that this driver reacts to.

Can you reflow the Luxeon Z off and swap in a color MCE? If you have one and if they are the same footprint? If it works right with MCE then the problem would be confirmed to be the Luxeon emitter.

If the footprint is different, you could try an MCE on an MCE star. If it worked that would confirm that the problem is with the Luxeon emitter or star.

No. Can’t just swap emitters. The luxeons are four small separate emitters, each with their own footprint. I do have an extra MCE mounted on its own board, but I have to await a renewed driving force before I can tear this one apart again.

A dirt cheap SkyWolfEye (don’t bother)
1-mode 1xAA-2xAA driver and an old amber XPE emitter
for use with a “4/3AF” NiMH cell, to give to a friend who already has several such for nighttime winter use, way off-grid.

Old school, an SP-98 Sipik clone with a swirly multi tone blue/lightblue/white pattern either painted on it or wrapped. My friend wanted more out of it, so I stuffed a 1/2” thick copper plug in the hollow pill, glued it in with Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive, used a 20 to 17 brass adapter ring to mount a 17mm FET+1 driver with A6 firmware. Swapped in an XP-L HI emitter on a 20mm Noctigon.

Pretty bright! The square image shows the oddly patterned XP-L HI die quite well, not sure if I should have done something different there, might pull it and put a domed XM-L2 U4 1A in it’s place.

Ouchyfoot, it may be that the rubber cylinder in the button cover is preloading the switch giving it a hair trigger. Swapping out switch modules won’t change anything but shaving the cylinder .5-1mm can easily fix it. Or a thicker aluminum disc that stacks on the switch.

A Nitefighter F41C :

It came in a three tone brown/blue anodizing. I like the 26650 format with a side switch, but this little “ugly duckling” was hidden away.

After almost a year in exile I took it out and started the transformation :


Bead blasted.

The internals needed some work too :


XHP-50 5B

The driver is a LD-2 and the power comes from two 26350 batteries.

Nitecore EC4S XHP-50 3B (left) Nitefighter F41 XHP-50 5B (right)


Nitefighter F41 XHP-50 5B

Eagle Eye X6 with the same driver/LED.
I am sorry I didn’t take any photos of the innards, we all need a good laugh every now and again :wink: , it ain’t pretty but it works. I will have to open it up again in the near future to fix the e-switch the only glue I had was hotglue, not the best for a 6A XHP-50.

Sweet. That bead blasting does it for me. :slight_smile:

My hunting friend asked me to mod this light to infrared and make it a one cell so he can mount it on the side of his IR scope. It is a trustfire 3T6 rebrand. First pic is not mine but just for reference.

I have no idea about the output or beam profile so I’m just hoping it works ok when he uses it the first time :cowboy_hat_face:

Some cameras let you see IR light. Maybe you could check out the beam that way. :smiley:

That did occur to me but meh, I’ll wait to hear back from the owner.

Nice work there panda. :beer:

Modded a Kronos X5 into a quad 219C!

Spacer, MCPCB and head is soldered together.


Will need to update the driver to one from RMM, since the stock driver does not like high amps. It just blinks and shuts down on turbo. Same thing happened on another triple I had and another user a few posts earlier. Works fine on low amp cells.

Ya just gotta love that little jewel right there!

I wore one virtually identical on my belt for about 5 months, the only thing that bumped it was a similar quad I made myself from scratch. Figured, when I tell people I made it that should hold true top to bottom. :wink:

Thanks, I think the bead blasting gives a nice finish, not as coarse as sand blasting.

That would be me and triple XP-G3 S2+
Since then I found out that it works OK with Keeppower 18350 IMR cell, gets hot quickly so ti must be pulling some nice amps but when I try to measure, it goes back to “blink->1 mode” behavior…

Sirius9, if you have a clamp meter you can pull a true current reading off the top end by making a loop between the end of the negative lead and the mcpcb. This works fine without making the driver bump down. I have quite a few working Bistro’s that won’t read current at the tail, have some that will, usually have to resort to the emitter amperage up top though.

It seems like there’s a balance somewhere between a hot 18350 and a good 18650. A hot 18650 simply allows for more power than the ATTiny25 likes with these Manker built Bistro’s and some scratch built ones. Something about going from 11A to 15A… :wink:

I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that the increase in current causes more induction and stronger voltage spikes so maybe increasing the value of the input cap might control it?

I think TomE found (as did Richard) that a high value resistor on the positive input stabilized it and made it work smoothly. Like a 40,000 ohm or something like that.

Limb broke, waah!