I’m thinking of doing something silly with a 18650 light (either my XIAOZHI or the HD2011) which requires running it on fast strobe for however long the battery will last. Would this be damaging to the light or battery? Will it overheat the light? :Sp
Shouldn't hurt a thing. Think of it as very low frequency PWM - 50ms on, 50ms off (or whatever the driver uses, it'll be close to that). The driver does the same thing in the lower modes, pulsing on/off, just fast enough that the switching isn't visible... well, the good ones, anyway. :)
Shouldn't damage the LED, and the power used is usually the high power rate times the duty cycle of the strobe so the light shouldn't overheat if it can run on high for a significant time without overheating. I'm less knowledgeable about batteries but as long as the driver has low voltage protection I don't think there is a problem.
That's the only thing I can think of. If using a protected cell it doesn't matter, the cell will take care of itself. If it's an unprotected cell I'd check it first with a nearly-flat cell, something like 3.4-3.5v. Let it run down and see if the driver steps in at 2.8-3v to prevent overdischarge.
Nanerpuss
cool, i wanted to know the same thing, since i read on another thread, some ppl used strobe for halloween effect.
so it wouldnt over heat? thats odd. i thought it would, since strobe is basically on high mode.
i know its on/off, but the off moment is like a split second, so i figure its like on high mode the entire time…no?
if this is true, then i can maybe even use my srk on strobe and wouldnt overheat…that would be awesome
I think the on time is much less than the off time, your eye takes a while to recover from each flash making it seem longer. Remember how long a single camera flash lasts in your vision.
The many heating/cooling cycles would probably shorten the life of an incandescent bulb a lot.
From using the programmable Asgard driver and making blinky modes, the settings that most closely match the strobe on typical drivers ends up at 30ms on/30ms off or 50ms/50ms. So 50% duty cycle, or roughly the same as half of the 'high' mode current.
The question is whether on/off switching involves spiking in currents. Even if there are spikes, it may not be large enough to have much adverse effect. As for overheating, if spiking is negligible and duty cycle is 50%, ask whether Medium setting overheats.