I don’t have time for a full review, so here’s a short one.
I meanwhile have an old H02, a new H02 and a new H02R.
You probably have seen pictures; it’s a nice light, the head band feels comfortable (though I don’t have much comparison), the H02 has a smooth, but actually relatively narrow flood (d-c-fix has a wider flood), with the new version the modes are well spaced, the lowest mode could be lower, well, the usual issues with a set of given modes. The magnet feels a bit weak; it holds the lamp in place, but it feels not very stable. The new version has a more roundish head, so it won’t tail-stand, uhm, LED-facing-up-lie well. However the emission to the side, tail-stand capability and the magnet-tail give quite some versatility. To switch it off you need to press it for about 1s, which I don’t really like. It activates quite easily in the pocket, but can be locked out at the tail cap (fraction of a turn suffices). With the new H02/H02R I personally find the imprint a bit too prominent.
I got the old H02 defective from someone for a low price. It had fallen about 50cm from a car onto concrete (magnet too weak? Don’t know), and an inductor contact inside had broken. I could fix it. I don’t know if it already was that way before, but the mode spacing was bad, like very low, med, high, high, no difference between the two ’high’s - might be a side effect of the defect, though the highs are as high as the the new H02’s high. I don’t care much, since I’ll soon develop a custom driver for them anyway.
My new H02 was CW, so I instantly modded it to NW (4C). A day after I got it it fell down, about 50cm on a wooden floor, and from then on it only had it’s low mode. I took the driver out and found that a 0603 cap on it was broken, literally. So I wonder, does the driver have some mechanical stability issues? It has a quite heavy daughter board soldered perpendicularly to the round main board, maybe not that shock proof. I took the cap out and replaced it by what I had at hand, an 1µF 0603 cap. The effect was unexpected: When I change modes, it now softly ramps to the new brightness level, about half a second to the next mode, about 1.5s from high to lowest. Funny and quite unique
The H02R has a typical spot&spill beam like other lights with a small reflector. The spill is wider than the fuzzy spot of the H02.
I also want to build an RGBW light with it; I tested H02’s diffuse TIR on an XM-L color, it does quite a bad job of color mixing, so I’ll use the H02R with d-c-fix. I actually recommend getting a H02R, and if you need flood, apply some d-c-fix diffuser film.
I’m quite sure the circuit is a no-PWM current-controlled driver, and I have to say I don’t like it. Sure, it is more efficient in the low modes, but there’s a quite noticeable tint shift (low modes have a warmer tint) that I find somewhat disturbing.