Been away from light building/forum for a bit because I have been raising my newborn. The other day I decided to build a new light. A while ago, I ordered a warm XM-L2 on a 20mm SinkPad. I used a c8 body with a 2100ma 105c driver and added 2 more 7135 chips to the board to make it 2800ma. Its pretty bright and throws pretty good, but I wasn’t extremely impressed by it. Can these be pushed a little harder? I have seen some mods where the 7135 chips were stacked, but have never tried it myself.
If you can stack the chips, go for it. If not then a BLF17DD or wight’s 17DD-SO8 will drive it very well.
How many amps they putting out? I have couple more cool XM-L2’s I may play around with.
Depends on the battery but they usually pull 6A and up so the light will warm up quickly.
Wow! XM-L2’s are ok to driven that hard?
It’s usually fine with DTP but the new XM-L2s can’t seem to be driven that hard even on copper.
Chazzy hit the nail on the head.
Please take look at post #51 for djozz’s results at 0.5 through 8.0A w/ an older XM-L2: djozz - Crash-testing a XM-L2 and a XP-G2 on copper Sinkpads
New stock sounds like it’s much more fragile, but XM-L2 more than a few months old should survive around 6-7A DD or using a linear driver. [Buck drivers can produce problematic spikes in the output and blow LEDs at that current. Proceed with caution w/ buck drivers.]
Im going to try stacking a few chips and running it around 4 amps. I think that will be bright enough and also safe, especially considering the light isn’t for me. Thanks for the help.
That should be safe / worry free. Hopefully you’ll find the output a little more to your liking.