DIY World's Brightest Single LED Flashlight (not clickbait)

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
1

DIY World’s Brightest Single LED Flashlight


Compact…


Not like the one Hacksmith made




If you always wanted MORE light to destroy that ugly darkness, I have the solution

Well, I will have.



Because I have the world’s brightest LED



This beast can output up to 120 000 lumens




and consumes more power than my oven.


It uses more power than any of the items I use on a daily basis.
I can use hair dryer while watching TV, washing clothes in the washing machine, charging my phone and laptop, with all lights in the house turned on and this single LED will still use more power than all those things combined.
2000W is a lot of power. How to power this thing? One 21700 won’t be enough, I guess…



Ok but let’s start from the beginning:
This massive LED is produced by Yuji: a company specializing at high quality LED technology.
Well, but many companies can say that. “We are the best”
But how many companies will have their LEDs installed as one of the main light on the International Space Station (ISS)?

Not many


Now when we know Yuji is a serious company, let’s see what you can buy in their store.
You can buy this connector:



Or this pretty expensive cable. Looks like regular cable to me, not sure why it’s so expensive:



If you need high quality LED, you can order this one:

10pcs, so $7 for one


Or you can buy this massive beast:




If you are worried about bringing new flashlight and explaining to your wife you really need this one (and it’s different than 37 other flashlights you already have) imagine bringing this single LED and explaining why you really need this small round disc that is more expensive than your car.



Well…anyway, let’s go back to main topic


Here are some specs if you are interested






And a closeup


But what makes this particular LED special and better than…idk, this?

Some may argue that this one uses 4 Nuclear…something, but keep in mind this is different technology and my flashlight won’t have any Nuclear…things.
This was a bad example, but what about this one? Why buying expensive LED if you can buy a whole flashlight for a fraction of the price
__

Sadly, it’s no longer available. Seems like it’s very popular and manufacturer can’t keep up with production
__


Having nearly 9 million lumens it sure is hot!


But what will make my flashlight better than this one?
Mine will have better range

I mean if you produced flashlight that has nearly 9 million lumens and only 1500 meters range, you definitely should go back to drawing board. Or sell your business and move on.







Ok, enough jokes
I will try to make the brightest single LED flashlight in the world using this yellow disc. Pretty well engineered disc. But still disc.
In theory, everything is simple:



  1. Unbox the LED:



    That was easy! I hope next steps will be easy too.



  2. Find sufficient cooling solution
    I don’t think the regular passive cooling would be enough.
    On the other hand, I found this flashlight

    They are using copper heatsink, very clever, because as we know copper dissipates heat better than aluminium.
    I know, 600W is not as much as 2000W, but maybe I can find slightly bigger copper plate and it will be just fine.



  3. Think how to power this thing

    Perfect :+1:


    Or even better

    And it’s not even that expensive. I can order 6 to have a total of 119400mAh



    At first I was afraid it’s not true and real capacity is lower than described, but then I saw this

    I feel stupid for even thinking of questioning anything they put on the website.



  4. Find good body for the whole flashlight
    Well, the LED itself is bigger than the whole reflector of my Convoy L8. And L8 has already a massive diameter.

    This thing is simply huge when compared to regular size LEDs

    It’s even almost as big as a whole 18650 flashlight



    You might not have L8 or an old flashlight, so I compared the LED to more common things

    It’s slightly smaller than the orange, but I must admit, this orange is pretty big


    So…the whole flashlight will be bigger than a standard big flashlight, but it will be significantly smaller than this thing made by Hacksmith:





    I have one more picture, here is my huge mug for size reference

    Alright, I just wanted to show off my mug :roll_eyes:



And that sounds like it. As simple as that.

Stay tuned


3 Thanks
2

Staying tuned… This aught to be good :smiling_imp:

You mentioned the cost being more than a car (??), but not a dollar amount? What do they cost?
Anyway, I hope you got a good deal… or have too many cars to worry about it. :upside_down_face:

3

You can check it here

This link is also in my original post.
Well, I meant a cheap car, definitely not a new one. My brother once bought a working car for $100. By the way he loves cars and he has definitely too much, I remember couple of years ago he had like 10 cars, but none as expensive as this LED :sweat_smile:

4

Yeah it was in your OP. I just didn’t click the link. But, $1350 … WOW. That is going to be one expensive flashlight. Will be real interested to see what you do for a power supply and driver.

5

I love the title of this thread…
“(not clickbait)”
:grin:

6

We need copper spacers for triples…

1 Thank
7

I reckon you’ll need active cooling and even then turbo will be limited.

With regard to copper vs aluminium heatsinking - copper absorbs the heat faster (better for turbo applications). Once the heatsink is saturated (reached its peak / stable temperature) copper and aluminium are very similar in performance. Left to cool, aluminium will cool faster because it is less dense and dissipates the heat faster.

So if you’re not considering active cooling you’ll need to wait longer for the host to cool down before accessing deathstar mode again.

1 Thank
8

Lol, your humour cheered me up.
Awesome LED, i’ll be following this build with interest.

The sales page claims 1500W rather than 2000W, but also cites 48A at 41V which is pretty much 2000W.

image

Hopefully you’ll figure out which is correct, just wouldn’t want you to cook the LED!

9

Active cooling seems like a good option.
About copper vs aluminium, I have already read a bunch of articles - I read what you said about heat dissipation and cooling, but some articles said it is not true and aluminium will not cool down faster.
In any case, I will use copper, because it is cool :sunglasses:

1 Thank
10

This flashlight is claimed to be 501,031 lumens.

11

I assume your light will be powered by some lithium polymer high output batteries, with well over 50C output capability.
I will guess you will run a 10S setup, maybe 12-15S to account for voltage sag.

Battery life in the couple minute range?

You could always run it off a 2000W power station but that would be heavy and unwieldy. Or a gasoline generator, even more unwieldy

12

I guess it’s like 1500W typical, but 2000W max.
Thank you for pointing that out. I will ask Yuji to be sure

13

I know this Hacksmith flashlight is claimed to be 500k lumens, but it’s still big. If mine can output 120k lumens, it won’t be just 4 times smaller. We’ll see, but I will try to make it as small as possible

14

How about vapour chamber as one part of the heatsinking system ?

image
image640×640 65.3 KB

1 Thank
15

You will probably end up with a bright water cooker :teapot: :tea: :flashlight:

16

you can make it super bright if

a. the LED doesn;t have to last long
b. you have a super battery
b.5 you don;t care how long the battery lasts - either the discharge time, or the total lifetime
c. you don;t care about heat [somehow - also related to a.]
d. you don;t care about tint
e. also you can concentrate the light into a beam - but that is ‘candelas’ not ‘lumens’

17

If I recall for a given unit of mass copper can absorb more heat while aluminum can dissipate more heat. This likely explains a long-running trend in CPU heatsink designs where the heat spreader in contact with the processor is copper while the radiator is aluminum.

18

Yes, I considered that one - the main problem is to find something as big as the led, which is at least 8cm, ideally 10cm

19

a. I want it to last as long as possible, it would be sad to damage such a great LED quickly
b. I will order that 19900mAh 18650 battery, should be plenty of power
c. I want it to run as cool as possible… also to be as cool as possible :sunglasses:
d. I care about tint, I was thinking about a way to dimm it without changing tint, will tell about in the next big update/post
e. I want the beam to be concentrated, it would probably be cool to have a wall of light, but…I like to have some throw as well

20

I understand your point. I will dive deeper into this topic and reply with better knowledge - I am pretty sure what you said might not be accurate, but I need to learn more and refresh my knowledge. On the other hand you might be right, so I don’t want to argue :slightly_smiling_face: