agnelucio:
I programmed it with Narsil a modified version of Narsil which took me two weeks to fully debug and test, and soldered it into the LD-29. To summarise the changes, the ‘brightness mode sets’ and config have been removed (except for thermal limit calibration) , and another table has been added to the ramping system, simulating a ramp behaviour but between discreet brightness ‘steps’ (this also involved a lot of modification to the ramp-handling code, which I won’t detail here). The ‘on-board LED’ function was re-purposed to switch an ‘enable’ pin on the LD-29 which puts the buck control chip into a low-power state when the light is off and idle (this reduces quiescent current from 3mA to 0.45mA, which is still not as good as many other drivers, but is acceptable, and is significantly less than it would otherwise have been). I also configured the ‘blinky’ modes to be strobe, 2 sec beacon, and an improvised but somewhat effective ‘virtual lightning mode’ . It is set up to always use thermal step-down, and I have tweaked the code so that step-down works with both continuous ramp and step mode, and so that repeated step-downs happen sooner if the temperature does not drop fast enough. Also, for the sake of convenience; the last used brightness level (in either mode), whether ramp or step mode is active, and the thermal step-down limit are all saved in EEPROM, so when I change the battery, it turns back on exactly as it was.
Interesting. That sounds like it took a lot of work and involved some relatively deep changes. Are you planning to share the code?
Also, have you seen my FSM thread? It has some things pretty similar to what you changed — discrete ramping instead of mode sets, simpler config, faster thermal regulation, and lightning mode.
I made a UI toolkit for e-switch lights. It makes new UIs relatively easy to create, makes porting UIs to new hardware relatively easy, and makes bugs relatively easy to avoid. But that still leaves a big question:
What makes a good e-switch UI?
So I’m hoping to get some discussion going about what people want in a UI. What’s good, BLF?