Custom RGBW driver (with some interesting features)

No answer, ok, I'll just post them here :bigsmile:

This was by far not an easy mod, precision was required and everything can and will go wrong if you are me, luckily the essential parts stayed alive, I was able to repair it all.

The Solarstorm SC02 is a small and lightweight 18650 light with an e-switch, and it has the correct head diameter for the quad optic that goes with dsche's quad board.

After removing the bezel and lens, the pill can be hammered out with a wooden pole inside the battery tube. From the driver I rescued the little switchboard for building onto DrJones's driver (and later the diode, after I had blown the original one). Pictures of building up the RGBW-driver with e-switch fitted are in post #49 and #52.

For extra rigidity I decided to glue the switch-board in with with AA Adhesive. And I wanted 3 chips per color, FET for white:

(stereo)

The dsche quad DTP copper board needed adapting for adressing the four leds individually, part of two traces were cut out (new scalpel blade, extra care). I luckily had some experience with that (adapting an XM-L Sinkpad for a XM-L colour), if you go through the dielectric layer, shorts to the core are unavoidable and very difficult to repair, copper on this scale is like a stiff paste! (the dark brown stuff is the dielectric layer)

I made a copper spacer from a piece of 20mm copper rod (sawing+sanding). Measured very accurately the thicknesses and depths of all the parts in the head to calculate the right thickness (7.7mm)

The leds were soldered on the board and at the same time the board was soldered to the spacer by placing the whole thing onto the heat-block. Had three leds not lighting up (shorts to the core) but after replacing it on the heat-block and lifting them up and repositioning the leds, they all worked.

Oh, I wanted a dedomed XP-L at first for the white led (the white route is direct drive with a FET) but I thought the output (1000+lm) would not suit well with the limited output of the colour leds (apart from heat problems in the rather thin-build host). So I went for an old-school Nichia 219A 92CRI that draws about 2A direct drive, 4 times less output but nice tint :-) .

Wires!!!

The SC02 stock driver had a ground wire screwed to the pill for contact, I thought it was a good idea to keep that, but the original screwhole was on the edge of the pill where the heatsink will rest, so I relocated it inside by tapping a new M2 hole. Btw, eventually I bored the hole in the middle further out to make more room for the wires. I also carefully reamed the hole in the ledboard somewhat to make space (the electrical traces on top of the ledboard start a bit away from the hole)

After assembling the lightengine I had a short from the blue-minus to ground (it always lit up) so I had to disassemble again. In the end I put the thing together and disassembling again four times to repair trouble, the last one was replacing the diode that even did not require disassembly because it is on the underside of the driver :tired: . Anyway, after four solder jobs the carnage looked like this:

But hey, it now worked!

I assembled it with a thick rubber plumbing ring that I had around the copper spacer so that it is firmly kept in the middle of the wider head. The spacer is not fixed to the pill, it is just pressed against it by the bezel (the pill edge was carefully sanded flat, 'flat' is everything in heat-transfer!), heat passes that barrier just fine and I can more easily disassemble the light again if needed. It appeared that the spacer was still half a mm too thin, so I put the stock glass lens back, in front of the TIR. The o-ring does not sit perfectly but it looks fine and it does its job.

Now the beams that come out of a TIR do overlap nicely but are not perfectly smooth, so colour mixing is not perfect too. So I sanded three of the four TIR's a bit (not the white one!) to smooth the beams out a bit. While sanding he little recessed lenses, by accident I sanded the white lens too , but that appeared not too bad for the white beam too, it is pretty neat now.

Now colour mixing is pretty ok, while the light still throws a beam.

White on highest setting puts out 250 lumen, lowest setting 0.8 lumen (), well done Dr. ! I like the white UI very much, only personally I do not like the memory for white, I would like to always start lowest (ramping up is easy and goes naturally by holding the switch).

While playing with the light for a while (it is irresistable :-) ) I noticed the green is flickering a bit, uh oh, usually such things are the start of worse. So it will be disassembly time again sometime, jay...

That's it, don't try this at home, a very frustrating mod it was, while I want nice and clean and fast mods! ;-)