Recharge at green is pretty much what I do, too.
Anyone know offhand what the lumens or current is where the aux button LED switches from dim to brighter? I’m finding that’s a good medium brightness level. I could look at the source, but thought I’d ask.
Thanks for taking the time to come up with all that info. I agree, since Mco77 is using the lowest output, his TS10 battery is lasting longer than his D3AA battery, because the D3AA is less efficient than the TS10, at lowest mode. (not because of parasitic drain when the light is off and the Aux are off)
@jerv, do you (or anyone) have any idea how many lumens the D3AA output is, at 100 mA?.. and, below what lumen level (or ramp level ? of 150) is the D3AA less efficient than the TS10?
I compare the voltage from my Anduril lights to my DMM, but I dont try to make them match exactly… if they are off by 0.1V I dont really worry about calibrating the light. Plus Im told my DMM could also be off a bit… Also, the Anduril Voltage reading changes by about 0.1V, when the voltage reading repeats a few times, and also after the battery has been resting. Imo a variation of 0.1V is normal.
Bottom line is Mco77 does not have the ability to measure parasitic drain, so there is really no way to know for sure how much his D3AA is consuming at lowest mode, nor how much standby drain the light has.
My D3AA changes from dim button light to bright button light at 26 lumens. This is very different than my Sofirn SC21 Pros, whose button light goes to High Bright at 104 lumens. Both lights have DD 4500K 519a.
Comparing TS10 to D3AA Voltage and Output change Overnight
I started with two freshly charged Wurkkos 14500 batteries.
Both lights set to as close to 15 lumens as possible.
The lights were On for 13.5 hours.
Voltage readings are from my inexpensive DMM.
Conclusion:
The the TS10 battery voltage dropped to 2.90V, the D3AA dropped to 3.55V
The TS10 dropped to 0.09 lumens, the D3AA sustained the 15 lumen output
disclaimer, I do not know if the results differ due to the two batteries being non identical. I dont have any way to determine that. Maybe someone with better equipment can produce a more controlled test.
Just switch batteries and look if the results are similar.
Can someone tell me if my lumen estimates (green box) are in the ballpark?.. iow, does the 0.8 lumen level have 34.3% efficiency?
I switched the batteries for this next test, at 5 lumens.
TS10 stepped down to sublumen after 34.5 hours, the battery reached 2.90V and triggered LVP.
The D3AA battery is at 3.54V… and holding near 5 lumens still
I then ran the D3AA for 3 more hours, still at 5 lumens, for a total of 37 hours, when it suddenly stepped down to less than 0.01 lumens, with the battery at 2.99V
a note of caution
When the TS10 and D3AA step down from long runtimes at 5 lumens, it happens suddenly. Essentially giving the operator no warning that the battery is getting low.
There is no gradual dimming, no series of steps down, nor any blinking output that will warn the operator before the light goes dark, and leaves you stranded.
So… monitor your battery level… When it gets below 3.5V, the remaining runtime at 5 lumens is about 2 hours…
here is an output and runtime chart thanks to data from 1lumen
Could this driver could be used to drive a lower voltage output, that is, two 3V LEDs in series?
I would really love a KR4 dual channel with an efficient driver. I don’t require both channels to be active at the same time, so a single driver that switches between the channels would suffice …
Just an update for those interested. I finally managed to track the voltage drops using a multimeter across a few days.
Day0 is 4.14V with Day7 at 3.648V. I noticed the voltage drops of around 0.04V from Day0 to Day4 then a spike to 0.1V from Day5 (around 3.85V reading) and onwards.
Asked Hank about it and he said it’s normal and recommended to loosen the end cap a bit to remove any parasitic drain, which I’m now doing.
It’s not normal of course, the parasitic drain is a bit higher than with li-ion only lights due to the always on system boost converter for dual fuel support, but it’s nothing noticeable in practice.
If that’s just the voltage dropping without usage I agree that that’s not normal.
It’s about 40~45uA at 3.6V. About 2.5years with a 1000mAh cell.
That’s pretty good for dual fuel! That small boost converter is really nice. Is it higher on a T1616 equipped driver, or are avr32dd and T1616 similar in terms of quiescent current in sleep?
It’s similar I think, maybe AVRDD slightly higher than T1616.
I wouldn’t use the same boost IC again because I realized too late that it can’t passthrough, and when Vin is higher than target coutput voltage it has a very high ripple voltage (depends how much higher), thus I had to raise the target voltage to 4.1V, which increases the MCU and main boost IC power consumption a bit (aux leds too).
The ideal target voltage would be about 3.6V, as the main boost IC starts to power itself from Vout below 3.5V which significantly increases its power consumption. (9V to 3.3V burned in the internal LDO)
With the disclaimer that I understand pretty much nothing about electronics, is this why the aux lights are so bright on low?
It makes the high and low modes a bit closer in brightness, but mainly they are bright in low because the resistor values chosen for a very bright high mode (not my decision).
Does that affect the low mode though? Iirc people usually use something between 300 and 1k for high mode, while the chip internal pull-ups are between 10k and 50k depending on the chip. I wouldn’t expect the <1k resistors to make a huge difference there.
Those values are for like Lume1 drivers that uses a 2.5V LDO, barely above green and blue LEDs Vf.
For a non regulated VCC (4.2-2.8V) or here 4.1V the value are much higher and affect the low mode brightness.
Interesting, my only AUX led capable light is a HD10, and iirc that one had 300R on all channels (it is indeed pretty bright on “high”), and all channels having the same resistor means the color mixing is ass and everything is just green.
Well Wurkkos is notoriously bad at choosing aux resistor values.
With unregulated VCC the brightest configuration I use is 3.3k/10k/4.7k, for dual fuel AA I usually chose higher values like 6.8k/22k/7.5k or sometimes more.
(pull up resistors are ~30k)
I not sure I understand… are you talking about standby Aux colors?
