Sorry if this was already covered. I noticed a Variable Wattage Kick Module for Mechanical Mod / PV driver on FT and wondered if it would work with an LED. Does anyone have any ideas? The price is certainly attractive and it claims a range of 5-12 watts. Is this a boost design?
Reading the instructions: -
http://www.fasttech.com/forums/1429801/t/1054879/yes-you-can-put-kick-with-18650-this-is-how
it looks like it’s a gadget that fits inside the cell tube of an electric vaping doodad sandwiched between the -ve end of an 18650 and the case and gives an extra boost of current to the heater or whatever it is that vaporises the liquid. I can see what look like inductors between the two circuit boards and there’s a trimpot presumably to adjust the current. Whether it can drive a LED, I don’t know. Might be a handy device to have if it does work with LEDs.
I’m sure there must be somebody on the forum that knows about these things.
Please feel free to shoot me down in flames if I’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick :~
They're calling it 'boost' but then neglect any mention of volts or amps, only watts - and then, it says 'regulate the wattage'. As with nearly everything to do with vaping they use different words from what we do here in the flashlight universe. Who knows what it really does. It could be bucking the voltage down and increasing the current - in their weird parallel universe that may be considered a 'boost'.
it has to be boost. with vaping a mechanical mod, your load stays the same, and the input voltage stays (practically) the same. the only way to up the wattage would be to give it more current( which a mechanical mod is already direct drive), or up the voltage
say you are vaping a 3 ohm atty, with a single liIon, you will have 4.56w. you will need to bump it up to 6v in order to get to 12w
I had linked and suggested using this before in the 17mm boost driver thread.
There is no voltage boost on any vaping stuff.
Small electronics like that simply can’t handle the current and the inefficiency of a circuit capable of boosting the voltage at such high currents would fry your average li-ion battery.
With an output resistance of 1-3 ohms and a max power of 5-12 watts that means the square root of the output voltage being the inverse of the resistance meaning you get maximum wattage with the least resistance ie, 12 watts at 1 ohm and 5 watts at 3 ohm.
So with a 4.2 volt input and 3 ohm resitance you get 5.88 watts output. With a 1 ohm resistance this increases to a max of 17.64 watts. This module is limited to 12 watts. So this module can’t possible boost voltage. At most it’s a buck circuit to maintain efficiency at high current low voltage applications. At worst it’s simply a linear regulator. But it most certainly isn’t a voltage boosting circuit. I know because I modded a friends vape for smoking weed wax and you use similar circuits to regulate the vape temp so you can use short coils for high heat but not overload your battery.
yet you are wrong.
http://www.evolvapor.com/kick/
look at #7
I am not sure if the cheap china clones are a copy of the Kick from evolv... but there are in fact many boosted ecigs out there. how else would you get variable voltage ecig mods from a single cell?
“Note: IMR batteries are recommended for use in this device.” Thats a good sign for high current loads. If these do boost to 6V, we all know what that means. 
I’ll hang back for others to join in and offer more opinions. Its to bad there arent more specs available.
other devices that I know for a fact has a boost circuit in it is the provari and darwin. then there are hundreds of mods done with various circuits, most notably the TI ptn04050c
but according to matches test data on the xml2 on sinkpads, you are looking at about 3.5v at 3.4a which will bring you to your 12w limit... which has already been done with a single cell direct drive...
halogen 6V light bulbs? 
pasted from a review on FT
“Straight off of Evolv’s website
The Kick performs essentially the exact same Power Regulating function as the Darwin. Kick is a smaller version of the microprocessor electronics and programming as used in the Darwin. Power Regulation is exactly what the name implies - regulates the overall power (watts) output. Watts are the overall power output in any vaping combination of volts, amps and resistance (atty/carto ohms). The Kick detects the resistance of any atty/carto attached and automatically, and continuously, adjusts the volts and amps to deliver the user set watts level. Power Regulation provides the same power output (watts) even if the user changes resistance (different atty/carto). Boosted Power Regulation automatically compensates for any fluctuating variables, like battery drain curve and atty/carto resistance fluctuation (usually lowers over the life of an atty/carto) and thereby provides consistent overall power output (watts). ”
if it works with mtg2, I bet it stops working somewhere north of 3.5V when set for ~12W
“the Kick will not regulate well at the highest power levels if resistance is above 3 ohms”
Just like I said it won’t boost voltage to be able to maintain power above 3 ohms because you’d be limited to 5.88 watts, pretty much the bottom limit when using li-ion’s 4.2 volts. So you’d end up turning the regulator to 100% if you used 3 ohms of wire and it would only go down from there.
Did you bother reading it or even have any understanding about electricity and the difference between voltage and power? Nowhere does it say it boosts voltage period. It simply regulates maximum current. Have you ever built a vape before?
Even the number 5 paragraph says it is not variable voltage, it has to be a constant power buck system. That’s the only way to get the kind of constant current/constant power system. And read carefully if you use higher resistance wire you won’t be able to extract maximum power. If it was a voltage boosting circuit higher resistance wouldn’t affect the power output, the circuit would be able to maintain constant power by increasing output voltage. But it doesn’t because that’s not how these circuits work.
I’d go into more detail but one dead giveaway is voltage boosting systems for these types of circuits ALWAYS have fairly large inductors. You can try boosting using capacitors and flyback switches but that’s even more inefficient and you wouldn’t be able to fit the capacitors or the high current high frequency switching transistors on a tiny board. With an inductor based system it’s easier but you’d still be limited by output power.
look at what i posted above for the 3 ohm resistance. you need 6v in order to reach 12w with a 3 ohm resistance.
i am not saying this will be the boost circuit that we are all looking for at BLF, but it is a boost circuit.
pretty sure "the kick incorporates a boost circuit" is pretty straight forward and clear.
the provari is also an ecig with a boost circuit. but you are also limited to 3.5a
edit: "Unlike Variable voltage devices, the Kick does not need frequent adjustments" means that you can use a 1.8 ohm or a 3 ohm atty, and it will feel basically the same, because it has the same watts feeding it. it is a variable wattage device, not variable voltage. with variable voltage set at 6v with a 1.8 ohm atty, you will cook it.
which means it regulates it to a specific wattage, by adjusting the voltage. which means on the high end of the ohms limit, 3 ohms, it needs to push 6v to maintain the 12w limit, which it states it can do... i am pretty sure i understand enough about electronics and have read up about enough of the vw/vv ecigs to understand what is going on
any other facts you would like busted mr krabs?
dont try to talk down on my because you once made a current regulated device for your buddy to smoke honey oil out of. that does not mean you are the guru of all ecig devices
In mechanical mod, where power is unregulated, most people also use rebuildable atomizer, to build themselves the coil and so adjust themselves the resistance.
On the opposite there is Variable Voltage/Variable Wattage Mod (VV/VW mod). On VV mode, it will boost voltage, generally from 3 to 6V and in VW it will detect the resistance of the atomizer and adjust the voltage accordingly to the detected resistance to give the desired watt between 3 and 15W. IMR are recommanded only because of their safety.
BUT when you vape a VV/VW, most of the time it use pulsation, something the same as PWM I think. It’s not important for vaping but it still does some noise. Considering how it sounds, it’s very low PWM.
But not all mod use pulsation so the best is to try but it does not raise A, it raise V.
I’ve looked at what you posted above. And from the actual site.
“the Kick will not regulate well at the highest power levels if resistance is above 3 ohms” I’m not making that up. I took that from the link you provided.
Which means it can’t provide the necessary higher voltage than what the battery can provide. So when I built my vapes I always had to either use bigger wires to lower resistance and maintain the same amount of coil wraps, or use shorter wires which was a bad compromise, or use multiple wires which made sense on some builds as you could wrap more wick that way.
But from my own measurements the voltage output never went above battery voltage even when set to 100%
Also the PWM doesn’t boost voltage either. It’s just used to limit average current so if the PWM is 0 ie direct current you’re feeding 4.2 volts. But if you pulse it you take the average percent time on say 10% on time and the equivalent voltage would be .42 volts. In the real world you still get just as high a peak which does reduce efficiency but it is a crude but effective way of lowering consumed power. Exactly how our flashlight PWM works, but our PWM still doesn’t boost voltage. And the ones that do in the 18650 size still can’t put out more than an amp or so, still not enough to make 12 watts with even a doubling in voltage.
what did you use to build your device? it will not regulate above 3 ohms, which means at a 3 ohm resistance it will still regulate it to 12w. there has to be something boosting the output for a 3.7v battery to do that.
So, somebody figure out how many ohms an XML2 is, then this'll be somewhat relevant to the flashlight universe...
Here’s a decent discussion about boost circuits for vapes. It discusses pretty much all the points I’m trying to make. Trying to get a decent boost circuit for vapes is a lot harder, because the physical size would be impractical not to mention terrible efficiency compare that to simply using a buck circuit which can maintain very good efficiency as long as input voltage is higher than output.
These guys are the real pros who really know their stuff. All I simply did was mod some vapes. These guys design their own circuitry and they’ll admit boost is pointless.
I checked Google Translate but can't find the option for vape-to-flashlight.
Does their 'boost' mean the same thing as our 'boost'? High current/low voltage input, converted to a lower current/higher voltage output? Resistive loads are totally different animals.
I don’t think in the vape modding community it means the same thing many of those guys simply aren’t electronically inclined, at least not nearly as much as on this forum. It’s probably why they don’t talk specifically about the electrical capabilities of those regulators.
I find it hard enough to extract enough info from that site. And the Chinese sites I bought my vape hardware from was not any more helpful. I ended up just building and testing my circuits before installing them for friends and they never boosted voltage but regulated current rock steady like a champ. Set it to one current and even after element heating it maintained constant current unlike unregulated vapes which lowered current as resistance of the elements went up due to heating.