I’ve done several mods and builds over the last few years, nothing particularly special mostly Mag mods of one type or another, and I’ve recently completed another.
One of the biggest things that has helped me complete mods or get ideas for them is this forum. All the different information, custom drivers and firmware that float around on this forum is just magical and I just wanted to start by saying thank you to all of you who put your time and effort into making this forum a one of a kind.
Sooooo, on to the build…
A while back there was an offer going around for the Ultrafire F13, very cheap and I had my eye out for a 26650 light for a while so jumped straight in and got one. Overall I was please, output was nothing to shout about but for £6ish I wasn’t going to complain. After a while of reading threads and watching builds on here I decided that I wanted to do something a little different to my other lights with it.
None of my lights had a white and a red LED so I set about collecting all the parts I needed. This firstly needed wight’s 22mm FET + 1 driver on which I cut the trace for the +1 channel to give me two LED- outputs. Full power DD for the XP-L and two 7135 powering the XP-E. Of course with the FET powering the XP-L all the springs are resistance modded. Getting the two LEDs into the bottom of the reflector was going to be difficult. I decided to replace the XM-L with an XP-L giving me the same output but on a smaller foot print. To get the red XP-E in as well it required a fair amount to reshaping to the MCPCB cutting an entire side off of the 20mm board the XP-L was on and removing most of the 16mm board the XP-E was on and soldering them both onto a copper shim to keep them together and bring them flush to the bottom of the reflector. Also a small about of the bottom of the reflector needed to be removed to fit the XP-E in. The beam pattern isn’t great the White is full of little artifacts and the Red has a big hole in the middle of the beam, but I plan to solve these issues by giving the reflector a SMO effect later on.
Lastly but not least I needed a firmware to run this light. After much thought and some help from people here I settled on the BLF-A6 which I set up to give me two sets of modes one for the XP-L and one set for the XP-E. There are a few issue that I need to work out with it but I am please with how this little project of mine has turned out.
I did get a little carried away during the build so I didn’t get many photos but here is what I managed to take.
Thanks guys. I know the A17HYBRID-S, but I wouldn’t be able to configure it that way, that I can use it for a X6 3x XP-L + 1x XP-E red. The A17-L81 I didn’t know.
Even if there was a firmware that does what I like (seems like pyro1son has written exactly that), I wouldn’t know how to connect the wires of the LEDs and all that.
Thanks pilotdog. Sounds like a plan, I might give it a try. That way, I could use TK’s firmware and the 7135-only-modes would be adressed to the red LED, right?
Btw, I just re-did the driver in my S8. I took my own advice and used wights 17mm FET+1 driver with a piece of tape under the 7135’s output pin. Works very well indeed.
My other option would be to just use a little 0805 red that I have from my lighted tailcaps and air-wire it next to the main led. The red wouldn’t be nearly as bright, but it would be much less hassle i think
