What did you mod today?

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 Iā€™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, Iā€™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 ā€œblink->1 modeā€ behaviorā€¦

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 Bistroā€™s that wonā€™t read current at the tail, have some that will, usually have to resort to the emitter amperage up top though.

It seems like thereā€™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 Bistroā€™s and some scratch built ones. Something about going from 11A to 15Aā€¦ :wink:

Iā€™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!

Dude, it was a low hanging one, youā€™ll be fine, youā€™re lucky it was over the pool. :wink:

Last night I added an e-switch to my LED-Lenser style modded SK58.

Thatā€™s a freaking great idea! Thanks! I also have a triple xp-l x6 that does the same thing, and Iā€™ve always wondered how many amps it was drawing. I just couldnā€™t tell due to the driver bumping down.

So I measured 8.6 9.4 amps on turbo. How cool that I can measure it now. Thanks DBCustom!

I often use measuring LED current draw when everything is in pieces, disassembled but I just went straight to putting this thing together, used thick, very short wires, hard to solder so I kinda wanted to avoid dissasembling it. I did try it out with only protected cell I had (NCR18650B) and it seams it works, but It was a short test, cell was mostly depleted. Next one that I will make will be triple XP-L, will measure that one for sure :slight_smile:

Youā€™re welcome. I like that itā€™s real amperage up top, at the emitter, after any driver losses.

I make sure to use the negative lead because if it manages to touch the walls of the head while testing it will only bypass the driver and go direct drive off the cell. If using the red positive lead and it shorts, sparks and smoke and damage done in that same split second your heart and stomach meet jumping out your ā€¦ā€¦ :wink:

Thanks for the tip DB, and yes, those ā€œups I reversed the polarityā€ moments can be ā€œinterestingā€, I fried my tablet like that (internal battery life diminished rapidly so I tosed it out and left just two leads for external battery pack) along with several step up converters that I often use for different things like driving 12V COB leds or 12V fans etcā€¦

Spontaneous headlamp modā€¦

So I was walking down the isle of my local ā€œhome depotā€ style shop and saw a cheapo $8 3xAAA headlamp that looked like it could fit a triple, and as I have dual headlamp project ongoing I though Iā€™d have a shot at making a prototype triple headlamp to see if itā€™s worth pursuing.

I ripped out the LED, resistor and small switch, and stuffed some triple optics to see if it would fit nicely. It fits but not perfect, the hole is a little too large so I slopped on some glue:

I stuck a S2 spacer on the back with artic aluminia adhesive:

I didnā€™t want to glue everything in place and at the same time didnā€™t want the hole thing to fall part with flashing new firmware versions so I kept the original battery case and put a hole in it for the spacer and wires, and stuffed in one of my G-16 programmable constant current / PWM hybrid drivers. I didnā€™t want to use my FET based F8, it would probably melt the plastic a little too quickly. Itā€™s just an initial trial so 6 amps from 16 x 380mA 7135s is enough:

With my ongoing dual LED headlamp project Iā€™ve gotten annoyed with the wires sticking out. So when I was just walking down the isle of the shop I happened to see this:

It says max 10 amps on the description and is long enough for two projects. I chopped it in half, took a 18650 case from another cheapo headlamp, soldered it in and it was good to go! Funny I didnā€™t think of this before, itā€™s a pretty simple solution and more than enough for a prototype:

I couldnā€™t use the original crappy small switch so I installed my own. I squeezed it in using the existing plastic as support:

The downside was that the rubber switch cover wouldnā€™t fit under. As this is just a prototype test I slopped on some epoxy and stuck it on the outside. I donā€™t expect it to stay there for long, but it should last long enough for me to evaluate if I want a headlamp with a triple in it:

So here it is, my triple XLP-HI headlamp prototypeā€¦ spontaneously made within two days of simply seeing a cheapo headlamp in the store: