What did you mod today?

Today I finally modded my light saber, since the rest of the parts came in. I added a recharge/kill port and a recessed lighted switch.

It was kind of a pain; took a few hours. I had to unsolder parts more than once after messing something upā€¦ like when I had it all put together and realized I connected the switch light to the wrong charge port post. Much swearing ensued, since the fix involved working in a very small enclosed space full of thin brittle wires.

Oh, and I also made a fake battery I can plug in and put in a charger, to check or charge the real battery without removing it. Because every time I open the hilt I risk damaging the battery and electronics. Itā€™s weird putting a dummy cell in a charger and having it actually work.

Iā€™ll have to put up pictures later; for now I think itā€™s time to relax.

You should help them design a more mod friendly module/pill/light engine design and retire to Naboo.

Now you mention that, I re-measured the light and you are correct, I measured it wrong before, I probably did the current reading with the clamp meter at a too high range for these low readings. I now used a DMM at mA current setting:
The second mode is 3.1 lumen, at 16.1 mA. The led would be at 2.8V but the 7135 just burns everything off up to say 4V, so the efficiency OTF is 3.1/(4x0.0161)=48lumen/watt. Still not great because I measured the bare led (link), at 0.2A, at 113 lumen/W, in a flashlight there should be 90lm/W leftover, but times 0.7 caused by the the overvoltage burn-off, so 63lumen/watt. Perhaps at very low amps this led becomes less efficient (or every led? never looked into that actually).

Anyway, runtime suddenly went up to 19 nights of 11 hours :slight_smile:

My brand new mi-7 had been opened up :

Cracking the the threadlock and opening the bezel :

Head disassembling :


Switch assembly :

And now itā€™s baking at 250Ā°C :

Trying to get a light grey instead of this ugly pinkish redā€¦ slowly :

Swapping the CW XP-L HI for a 219C :

JG, At such low current maybe a nimh with a boost driver or liion with a buck driver would be more efficient?

Ideally you are very right. :slight_smile:
In practice, the BLF-A6 driver is what I had and it does the job, thereā€™s not many stock drivers that have a low mode as low as 16mA/3lumen. If thereā€™s a buck driver for single li-ion cells out there that have that nice low mode Iā€™m highly interested :slight_smile: . NiMh batteries will not do it either because whatever the efficiency of the system, for runtime (the light should last for the two weeks camping trip next week) thereā€™s no better option than a high capacity 18650 battery.

technically a repair.
an ancient dorcy 1aaa.
put in one of those 5mm high cri.
it must have a million hours on it.dim sick blue.nearly useless till now.
neighbors kid has had it 10 years.
its the flashlight equivalent of linusā€™s blanket.
downs syndrome kid.

Okay, I did a write-up for my light saber mod. Itā€™s on another forum though.

Short version: removed the obnoxious stock switch (was an ā€œoutieā€ so I kept bumping it by accident), replaced it with a better one (recessed, has a light inside), and added a charge/kill port so I wonā€™t have to open the hilt unless something inside breaks. And I did a pretty messy job of it all, but it works and the mess is safely hidden inside. :slight_smile:

A large part of the reason for this mod is that the ā€œSaberCore 2ā€ driver board has ridiculously high power draw in standby mode, shown here after turning the blade on then off again:

Most of that 200mA seems to burn off as heat in one chip, which stays too hot to touch unless power is physically disconnected:

I hope the heat wonā€™t be a problem, but Iā€™ve already heard from one person whose driver refuses to boot unless they blow on the hot chip to cool it off. Their thread got removed from the forum by an admin though, which honestly gives me the chills because itā€™s kind of an important thing to know. I should probably get some thermal transfer cubes and stick one between the hot chip and the aluminum host.

A few pics:

Not actually the layout I followed, but close enough. All I changed was tapping the switch light off the driverā€™s power source instead of the blade LED. Hereā€™s the actual layout I used:

I accidentally wired this wrong and didnā€™t realize it until everything was assembled enough to test. Oops. Much swearing ensued, since itā€™s a huge pain to move a wire after everything is all soldered together.

The switch had a few posts to connect tooā€¦ and it had to be done with part of the hilt already in place.

On the driver, I only needed to access PWR+, PWR~~, and BAT~~.

Taking out the kill key causes power to be connected, as indicated by the lighted switch: (this switch uses 20ma ā€¦ super-high current for an accent LED, considering the Kronos X6 tailcap is almost as bright at 0.5mA)

Magic trick and sanity check.

I made a fake battery so I wonā€™t have to remove the real one. Every time I open the hilt, it risks damaging the internals.

But in the end, it works and all is well.

I can finally turn it completely off by putting a little plastic plug in the charge port. And soon I should have some 3D-printed plugs which are low enough profile to leave in during use, and merely need to be rotated to connect or disconnect power. :slight_smile:

It may be just a glorified green flashlight stick, but itā€™s really fun to play with.

That is ridiculous and so very awesome TK. :open_mouth:

Light sabers were cool in 1977.

In 2016, they're...

still freakin' sweet!

After 2 hours at 250Ā°C, Iā€™ve still not reached a good color, maybe Iā€™ll strip the ano with baking soda to see how it turnsā€¦

Brushed steel on the left, polished Ti on the right

Warning: donā€™t do this (when the wife is) at home. :smiling_imp:

Well, considering the fact that the first time she met me I was using the dishwasher to clean my 125cc carburetorā€¦putting a flashlight in the oven isnā€™t really annoying for her

Back on April 30th I modified my then brand new Trustfire TR-J20 with 3 of the 9V MT-G2ā€™s, used 35mm Illuminations Machines reflectors and 3 Trustfire 32650ā€™s with 6000mAh and was seeing 13,500 lumens but it would heat up pretty good.

So today I decided to make a heat sink for it and rebuild itā€¦


I decided to add another emitter and make it a quad, using the Ledil Minnie reflectorā€¦ which is shorter. So I also cut an 8mm thick 78.9mm diameter spacer to sit on top of the emitter shelf (glued it in with Arctic Alumina Thermal Adhesive) and then I used the same adhesive to affix 4 Maxtoch 26mm copper mcpcbā€™s with 9V MT-G2s on em.

The filled head is now ready to take the heat from 4 MT-G2s and the light weighs in at 3.5 Lbs with no cells in the tube. :slight_smile:

I made an ā€œXā€ out of copper sheet to solder the positive pads on the mcpcbs to, then soldered an 18 ga lead to the X for power. A longer 18 ga negative lead makes the rounds and is soldered to the negative leads at each stop. :slight_smile:

It was doing a bit over 12,000 lumens with the cells low, theyā€™re on the charger now. I was hoping for 15,000 but donā€™t know if Iā€™ll get it with that long negative lead, itā€™s bright though, for sure!

Nice one Dale.

This is kind of a test to see if can post pics from imgur on my phone.

I sometimes hold this little light in my mouth so I cut the end flat and placed a rubber sleeve over it so I donā€™t grind my teeth.

https://imgur.com/a/vabTR

I donā€™t have specific emitter voltage from up top, but a tail reading of 22A is coming off the 3 cells, so is that up there in the 268 watt territory? I know the 9V MT-G2 can do a forward voltage up over 11V when pushed hard but I havenā€™t opened it back up to get top side readings.

The heat sink with thermal paste on it works beautifully, transferring heat all the way down to the battery tube. It takes a little while for the entire head to heat up, but it heats up pretty evenly, something it didnā€™t do in stock form. They had the lower head section (above the driver) open, empty, nothing but air, and all along that area is heavily finned on the outside. Filling that void with aluminum really makes use of those fins, and with plenty of heat being made itā€™s a necessary evil.

Canā€™t believe the 3.5 Lb weight, I didnā€™t put any copper in this one (save for the 4 MaxToch copper mcpcbā€™s)

268w is up there. Depends on how much voltage droop youā€™re getting under load. Still, itā€™s big Power for 3 cells :crown:

I discovered that my original inside-the-spring 20ga wire bypass on the switch as broken so I did a through board bypass with 18ga wire by modifying the large switch and itā€™s housing to let the fat wire fit into the tail cap assembly.

Now, with freshly charged Trustfire 32650ā€™s Iā€™m seeing 14,628 lumens out the front. Iā€™m going to have to call that success, being as how itā€™s a little more than 10,000 lumens more than the stock light was making with itā€™s 12 XM-L emitters. :wink:

That is a great flashlight, Dale! It must have been tough for you not to put tons of copper in it, even to the point that I like it now :heart_eyes: :stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

From me not a mod, but an observation. My first triple build, back in 2013 was a Convoy S5 with Nichia 219A 4500K high CRIā€™s on a Illumination Supply triple non-DTP board (Noctigon triple DTP boards were not there yet) and a Qlite driver with 4 extra chips (there were no BLF developed FET-drivers). It is still my most used light, I use it attached to a small stand to illuminate things all the time, for hobby and photography, but also on trips it goes in my luggage. But it is never been mis-treated or anything. It is also one of two triples that I made without glass lens to protect the optic. And look at it now, scrathed, bended and cracked (still works fine though), Iā€™m glad that all my later triples have glass lenses, to protect the optic from bending and scratching, it keeps the light more waterproof too.

Thanks Jos, can you imagine how heavy it would have been with a 3ā€ Copper heat sink? OMG! lol