No one thinks the Nanjg105C is the best driver, or the Qlite, or the LD2, but they are popular. There will always be better drivers.
There are three factors involved in popular 'standard' drivers: 1)must be pretty good (so not neccessarily the best), 2)must be easily available, 3)must be cheap enough.
Something is the matter with the last one. I intentionally did not say 'reasonably priced', because that is not good enough for a driver to be popular. Richard's drivers are very reasonably priced, considering the time and money that goes into them (I still wonder how he makes a living out of his business with the amount of work he puts into it). But the other perspective is that you still put 10+ dollar into a flashlight just for the electronics, I do not dare to explain that to my girlfriend.
Sorry you aren’t feeling well T.K.
The driver is proprietary, but still could be copied, just not exactly. And it would need some development to make it cheap and reliable to mass produce, anyway. The thermal sensitivity of the off time capacitor, for example.
I think most people don’t want direct drive high modes. Many of the cheap lights have resistor banks to reduce the on current, and 7135s are a clear improvement on that. The T.K. firmware is also for enthusiasts rather than for typical owners.
FWIW, I added attiny25 support to blf-a6.c, battcheck.c, and offtime-cap.c, and added some blf-a6 hex files for 13 and 25 calibrated for RMM’s drivers.
The OTC values are much lower… changed from 245/180 to 190/94. And the voltage values went up, 175/112 to 195/124. If you build your own drivers, you’ll probably need to do all the calibration again.
In any case, it all works on attiny25 now, and tiny25 build/flash/calibration tools are now included in the firmware repository. I didn’t add any new features yet though; that’ll happen later.
Can I ask a slightly of topic question? I was researching info to get ready to maybe doing some aver programming, and saw info on attiny25 vs attiny13a, and it looked like the minimum voltage for attiny25 was higher than for attiny13a. Is that correct? And if so, would that affect performance in a flashlight?
I dispute that the delivered A6 driver is the same as Wight’s driver. The PCB is laid out differently. The circuit design is borrowed from the NANJG 105C with the addition of the MOSFET and OTC, so I don’t see how that can be proprietary. If this design is proprietary, then the Chinese makers can just add a resistor the the gate of the MOSFET and call their new design proprietary. This, by the way, would reduce the turbo-to-moon flicker and would thus be a better design.
I’m referring to the driver described here. If the A6 driver is a copy of another of Wight’s driver, please let me know and I will admit to being wrong.
You probably want the attiny25v-ssu. It’s the same size as the attiny13a used on common drivers, and supports a lower voltage than the non-v version.
Without the V, I think it’s only rated down to 2.8V. I got one to operate at 2.7V today, but I wouldn’t count on it. The higher voltage would potentially interfere with low-voltage protection, or might require setting LVP to a higher limit.
If I recall correctly, wight made some minor changes to that version of A17DD-L but only released it to the BLF A6 partners. I don’t know what the changes were though, aside from dropping a via to pin 3 for easy access.
A girlfirend is one thing m8…try explaining to the wifey
Anyway, as a casual user that buys el.parts mostly from the net A177DD and its versions costs me like 3.5$ per piece( with Samsung resitors and caps), like 40-50 hours “lost” training ( C programming, reading the TK topic about that matter est) and some soldering work.
I think that china folks could easy sell this one for 5-6$ if mass produced, but ofc we dont know the authors opinion about that matter( Cheers Wight, we DO miss you)
Hi.
Managed to P.M. James at 3Tronics, and he replied:
“Hey,
Yep I stock the LD-2 driver, that was designed by led4power and permission from him to sell on my site, I’m happy to sell anything if I have a reliable source for stock, i don’t currently have the equipment (or time) to flash firmware, but if I have permission from the designer and a reliable source for stock I can’t see a problem.
James
I have no problem with you quoting me.
I can solder drivers that’s no problem, it’s just I don’t have the equipment to flash them.”
So that sounds quite hopeful for the unskilled ones of us in Europe
Interested to see in what form(s) this may pan out in the future.
I didn’t know that. Yes, if they used Wight’s layout, then it’s proprietary. But I still don’t see any reason why a Chinese company that can design a driver like the NANJG 105C can’t also design a board with MOSFET + 7135.
Good to know. I’ve got a 219C here waiting to be put into a light, and a FET+1 driver to go with it. I may have to configure it so the highest mode is lower than full power.
…
Looking at the graphs / measurements, I think perhaps I’ll give it a low-amp cell instead. ZOMG it has soooo much more output and lower voltage! It looks like limiting it by voltage isn’t going to happen, but a cell which can’t do more than 5 amps should keep it on the safe side of its output curve.
That lower mode will still be a FET-mode so the current may be PWM-ed but still full out, in case of a single high drain battery that looks to be more than 10A, the led is way over its maxiumum. This is not just heat related (heat problems can be solved by PWM-ing to lower modes) but over say 8A the output gets down and the led is turning blueish directly because of the current.
Hey Splott-Light, if you need some chips or drivers flashing feel free to PM me, I should have all my stuff back up and running in the next couple of weeks.
