Lumintop Tool AA Mod - 2300K Hi CRI rngwn 5mm LED

Ok so I just really enjoy using the Sofirn C01 flashlight, an awesome tiny light for indoors, tent camping, small spaces and potty breaks at night.
Could it be better? A slightly larger version so I would not loose it, powered by an AA cell vs AAA and have a push button interface, the best of all worlds.
Here is my attempt using the Lumintop tool AA as a host and one of the best 5mm LED’s available from Rngwn 2300K Hi CRI

1. Took the tool AA removed the led and driver module, simple. Removed the LED board an removed LED, figure out the best way to fit a 5mm LED

2. Drilled a hole in the LED PCB to insert the 2300K Hi CRI LED. Then drilled a hole in the Metal pill so I could mount the LED from inside the pill and eventually have a self contained pill

3. I actually drilled a larger hole in the pill so I could just fit the LED into the board and then glue it over the pill with the LED legs inside the pill. I then had to experiment and calculate a current limiting resistor to use to not destroy the LED in the 4 modes using a 1.5v cell. This turned out to be 15 Ohms. I took an 1/8 watt metal film resistor and put it in series with the + lead from the driver. This give the following currents for the 4 modes

Level 1 - 0ma (my meter only has 3 decimals after the . So it must be less than 1 ma)
Level 2 - 2 ma
Level 3 - 11 ma
Level 4 - 23 ma

! https://i.imgur.com/xWiAYnv.jpg!

4. Mounted all of this back into the pill and it is now nice and compact and ready to test

5. This is what it looked like assembled, not bad.

6. To smooth out the beam profile I added some 3M tape to the glass in front of the LED, this worked very nicely

7. Here are some after pics, this was a fun project, I have an awesome flashlight that is much better than my C01 and I actually made a second one, love the warm color and hi CRI
8. Lowest mode Level 1 next to my C01

9. Hi Mode (Level 4) also next to the C01

10. A shot against my workshop white painted door

My first real post here at BLF

I often see mods to gain more output but you did the otherwise.

Deep inside I wanted to ask “why did you do that?” but this is a cool mod and congrats for that.

Cool mod :wink:
I guess you did what most of us want: an AA version of the “C01”! Probably this isn’t a “joule thief” as you are using the original driver, but this seems a pretty nice mod and light! :+1:

Those LEDs have a nice tint at low outputs. Hard to beat.

Thanks for showing!

Nice mod, and thanks for the useful post. The ToolAA is a very nice compact host for this mod.

Nice job Skuzapo :+1:

Would be great to see if 2-3x run-times can be achieved with use of AA compared to the AAA in C01.

Very cool. Good work on lowering the current.

The 2300K is pretty tolerant of being over-driven, but I’m sure the unmodified driver would have been too much, unless maybe if you could figure out a way to squeeze three of them in there and provide a good thermal path for the legs.

Very nice mod, thanks for sharing!

Thanks all for the responses, a great forum. I will need to do a runtime comparison to see if I can get >2X the C01. The best part of this mod is that I have brightness selection from really low to a bit higher than the C01 in 4 increments versus the single level which is sometimes too bright at 3am. This is becoming my go to for night use in the house in the upstairs bedrooms when the family is snoozing. For some strange reason I am now moving towards using the least amount of light to get the job done and I am a sucker for warmer tints.

Very nice mod Skuzapo! High CRI is always worth achieving. :+1: