I received Muto’s giveaway light today, in excellent condition and very fast, lol. I put a couple batteries in it and it worked nicely…has a pretty nice hotspot too. I couldn’t help myself because I just knew this light could be capable of so much more. So I whipped it apart to see what was in it. There was absolutely no way water was getting in the head of this light. The glass is super thick. The driver is 24.9mm and I’m unfamiliar with the way it works with the switch. The head of the light has a switch that slides up for a single mode that activates the light. If anyone has any ideas as far as modding goes I’d appreciate it.
Oh… that is a hall effect transistor. It detects a magnet field moving to it and does things. I am not sure if there are any custom drivers that are set up to use those, maybe someone has built one for a magnetic ring light?
Wait, I thought I already answered this question. What happened to my post? The driver has a transistor-looking component hanging off one side that is called a hall effect sensor. The switch on the outside is actually just a magnet, and the hall effect sensor is activated by magnetism to turn on the driver.
I tried finding an off-the-shelf driver for some lights that have failed on me, and never did locate one. I’d love to see what could be done with this, but I am not yet capable of modding and/or building drivers myself. If you figure out how to boost output current on this thing, I’d be interested to know.
Edit: If you’re not going to use this light in the water, you could take out the magnetic slider, drill a hole through, and put an e-switch there. Change the driver to a good e-switch capable buck driver. Or, put a zener-modded driver in it, and change the emitters to XHP’s for some real excitement!
You did, I just started my own thread so it’s would get noticed. What would be cool is if it could be used as a variable output switch…the closer the magnet gets the brighter it gets.
I am not sure if that would work, I would suspect that 1 transistor will be needed for each mode. I think that is why the multi-mode lights use a ring. I would think that with software, it could be used like a mechanical switch… Off-On-Off to change modes. Would be fun to try making one, but I do not have a need for such a driver…
Actually, I read up a little on the hall effect sensors and found that sensing proximity and changing a variable output is possible. In fact, IIRC, it is the default behavior of the sensor itself. The associated circuitry on the driver determines how the signal from the sensor is interpreted, I think.