Building Drivers and Parts

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

Okay so, I’ve had the skills and now have the tools as well to assemble drivers myself. What I’m wondering is… What should I keep on-hand? What are the best resources for driver designs that I should be aware of? (I’m already aware of TA triple-channel repository , Oshpark Projects thread , and a few of Lexel’s designs are shared )

17mm and 20mm are probably givens. What kind of components am I going to need to keep around?

And another question: Where’s the best place to buy 7135s? The easiest is probably Mountain Electronics, but I know he’s just reselling them. And if I’m planning to keep a fair stash of them around, I should probably skip the middleman…

Anyway, depending on how good I get at this, and how much time I end up putting into it… Well, I’m not going to be Lexel, but I’d probably be open to building drivers for people in smaller quantities down the line.

2

MCU’s like the attiny85 or attiny1616 :slight_smile:

Shottky diodes for reverse polarity protection (or perhaps PFETs instead)

FETs such as the relatively inexpensive but good PSMN3R0-30YLDX

Resistors in 0806 or 0603. Depends on what you’ll need them for. Something like 100 kOhm for FET pull down and 4.7 kOhm in series to Aux LEDs.

Capacitors in 0805 or 0603 for “bypass” coming into the MCU. We usually use 10 uF for that purpose. If you’re building a driver with OTC, I think we usually use 0.1 uF for those.

3

Holy trinity: easyeda - jlcpcb - lcsc

4

I just started DIYing myself. The build kits from mountain and his parts are actually better price than buying them in 10 packs on DigiKey like I had been. The main thing you need to figure out is the programming stuff for the ATTiny25/13 which took me longer than reflowing the drivers. I bought a stencil and some boards to build Del’s 17mm driver… in my DIY toaster oven/PID reflow deal.

Working decent so far.

5

Lcsc - somewhere that actually carries 7135s. However, I can’t figure out what differentiates many of the part numbers

6

. Microne MEL7135PG ( Deathclaw ) have good reputation. If you want to experiment you can get some other. Its time to start read datasheets :wink:

7

I glanced at a few of the datasheets, and they looked identical… I’ll have to get out the magnifying glass.

Thanks for the response on the MEL7135PG

8

They might all state the same specs, but some have tested to be faster than others. That is to say, the “raptor claw” / “death claw” ones have been tested to work at lower PWM values, while others (like the “crappy sailboat”) need to be turned on longer (larger PWM values) in order to actually turn on.

tl;dr: some may work at lower PWM values like 3 while others won’t turn on until PWM value of 5-6 (assuming our “typical” 8-bit ~19kHz PWM).

9

Thanks - I knew I’d read about this to some extent, and I’ve seen it on my different lights - tweaking Anduril ramps showed me that some of my 7135s power on at PWM level 1, but some want 2 or 3…

10

I hope you are successful Scallywag. :money_mouth_face: I will prepare a wish list soon. :wink: