May I ask what you intend to do with the light if/when Jack replaces it? I would like to see what is going on in there, if at all possible and if you yourself aren’t keen on modding and plan on breaking in…
[♛ FreemeGB] Fireflies PL47 Gen II 4*XP-L/ Nichia/ SST20 Hi CRI 21700 Right Angle Flashlight - ENDED
Rot66 quality is way better… I bought two and problem free…
Pl47 is like a lottery… I bought two and one is defective…
So my PL-47 finally arrived today, unfortunately it seems to be doa which is quite frustrating.
I took a video to illustrate it’s non-funtion and will be sending to Jack now, hopefully I can get a replacement more quickly than the 8 weeks from order and 4 weeks from shipment it took for the faulty light.
I imagine that a picture of the QC sticker, light ID number, and the video showing good battery being inserted and not able to turn on (including four clicks to remove from lock out) should be sufficient?
Probably a coincidence but my QC sticker also shows inspector number 12 for what it’s worth.,
I just noticed what nokoff was saying about the aux/switch lights, mine does that too, 2 switch lights remain constantly on while the other 2 ar sinked with what the aux lights are doing. No big deal for me, just keep it as it is, I am wondering if it is due to an error in the soldering of the wiring.
BTW the headstrap is useless but I have an extra Imalent headstrap that works amazingly well this light, here is a link to an ebay seller, but I got mine from aliexpress for like $3 shipped a while back Can’t find the link.
So I guess my light is normal, thanks for the clarification.
A simple question. Does anyone actually care about these Aux. LEDS ? Are they so compelling as to make you choose one of these torches instead of something more mature (and less costly, that Aux. LED arrangement does not come for free) ? What practical purpose do they serve ?
Certainly it must be irritating when you paid for them, but they don’t seem to work properly.
AFAIK Lexel has not revealed the comms. protocol between his driver, and the Aux.LED MCU, and the switch LEDs, though it seems that TK might be informed, nevertheless it is still a total mystery as to how it is supposed to work and I doubt that it will ever be properly explained. No design description ever released AFAIK. Complexity, obscurity, for why?
I just don’t get it. This is not the old BLF way. So sad.
I’ll keep my thoughts to myself here yet would offer that yesterday’s glory is not the nation’s fault but the people’s. We were set a pretty straight forward course with the freedom to plot/follow it and…
Ok, just opened my champagne 219b. Everything is working perfectly w no defects.
I do have one BIIIIG issue with the tint though. It makes all the rest of my lights look inferior. This 219b is just toooo good! 
You have a knack for seeing mystery and intrigue where there is none.
There is no communication protocol. If the aux LED board is connected to power, it lights up. If not, it doesn’t. The MCU turns a pin on and off to supply (or deny) power, and this makes the button and aux LED boards light up (or not).
It’s about as complex and obscure as flipping a light switch on a wall. It’s basically the simplest possible circuit… power -> LED -> switch -> and back to power.
If the two controllable button LEDs respond but the aux LED board doesn’t, that probably means something isn’t physically connected.
Lexel's single post in this thread here: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/52899/97. Not sure if this is the implemented design or not.
Mystery? Well maybe a little. Lexel's only involvement in this thread has been that one post. I know I'd like to know more about the design of this AUX board, if that's what actually in the PL47, but mainly out of curiosity - hard to tell if I can leverage any of that to my mods, like adding AUX LED's to my ROT66 that doesn't have them, or on triples. I think the MCPCB would have to be customized.
The Emisar style of aux LEDs is really simple… just power, a resistor, and some LEDs. It’s somewhat brighter on a full battery and somewhat dimmer on a low battery. However, it also allows the MCU to set two brightness levels by using its internal pull-up resistor or not.
Lexel used a more complicated design which attempts to regulate voltage to keep the LED brightness consistent, and added potentiometers to manually adjust the brightness. Additionally, there is also a minimal controller which senses voltage and decides which aux LED channels to enable, so it can indicate low voltage or shut itself off. But in my testing it’s still brighter on a full battery and dimmer on a low battery, and the MCU can’t adjust the brightness level.
Both designs are built as an add-on PCB which goes over the main MCPCB. This seems to work pretty well in practice, and keeps all the parts nicely separated so it’s easy to mix and match main emitters and aux emitters. It also eliminates the need to modify the main MCPCB.
I think the way forward will probably be to upgrade the MCU to one with more pins, and then use the older simpler aux LED board style with multiple color channels controlled by the main MCU. This enables all sorts of creative uses, determined by firmware. The downside is having even more wires, but maybe we could use a ribbon cable or something. If there is room, it’s also really nice having the potentiometers.
To allow the aux LEDs to do things while the light is off, I added “sleep ticks” as an event in FSM. They’re like regular clock tick events, except they happen at a slower rate and only during sleep mode. That way it can blink or whatever, without using anywhere near as much power as it would while awake.
Ohh, ok - much better understood now. Thanx! I did catch some of the posts about the AUX LED support, but never enough to get the full picture, and wasn't sure what was actually done, went into production, etc.
Yeah, maybe we talked about the sleep ticks way back - seem to recall that, and probably how the Mankers do the dragon's breath. Wow - another amaz'n thing you accomplished in FSM/Anduril!
Oh, the “dragon breath” thing doesn’t use sleep. It simply runs normal PWM on the button LED. I think it does a triangle wave on the PWM value, counting up and down by 1 each time it changes. I measured power use at about 3mA to 5mA in breathing mode, which is probably too high to consider the light “off”.
For comparison, a BLF Q8 running Anduril uses about 1.7 mA on moon mode, or about 0.13 mA in standby with the button light on high, or about 0.03 mA in standby with the button on low mode. So dragon breath mode uses 2-3 times as much power as moon, or about 20 to 170 times as much power as simply leaving the button light on.
Is the dragon breath available on the PL47? I don't see it mentioned in the UI diagram. Interesting though - thought Manker was doing it in a low power state. I'll know a lot more once I get one - just got notice it's at my local post office 
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So moon mode must be running in sleep state of the MCU? I seem to recall the MCU in full power state is about 5 mA. Sorry, you probably mentioned this a dozen times...
Sort of related: Has anyone gotten the bezel off of a PL47?
This will be disappointing if I can't get at the LED's/driver/etc.
I was thinking the same thing, IIRC the bezel is press fit, maybe using a needle between the glass and bezel might help in removing it, lemme check…
Nope, a needle was not able to get between the glass and the bezel, maybe breaking the glass would help in removing the bezel if it is not glued in place, but I am not willing to try that…
I gave mine to my dogs thinking there isn’t anything the two of them can’t open, until the PL47. They now know defeat. The PL47 is impenetrable lol.
:facepalm: , oh boy... I've used a sharp knife blade at times for press fit switch bezels, but on this, not sure... Hhmm, probably should switch to the other PL47 thread - didn't realize.
Jack responded to my email really fast, less than 8 hours, and said a replacement will be sent for my DOA light, just no idea when that will happen
So, Emisar just drive the aux. LEDs through a series resistor. Cool, and practical, reliable and cost-effective.
It seems that Lexel does it with an LDO regulator, and uses an MCU purely as a voltage sensor, to turn on the red LED at low voltage. Seems a bit of a waste of an MCU, other more energy efficient ways of doing that, and from what you are suggesting the LDO regulator isn’t actually contributing much, if anything. Cell voltage drops, LEDs still get dimmer. Suggesting that the aux leds aren’t actually being controlled by the MCU, nor even being fed a stable supply from an LDO/resistor/trimpot combination.
Unless a trimpot is user-accessible, it should have no place in something like this. Just a bodge to avoid doing the work to select the correct fixed value resistor for production. If it really needs a trimpot to be tweaked on every unit, then the design is not good.
Choose a properly matched LDO and it will do the under-voltage lockout all by itself.
To achieve, basically the same result.
For low voltage warning, I suggest just to blink the aux leds (and the main ones if turned on). Starting at maybe once/minute, then increasingly rapidly until cell death voltage is reached. Even make the blinks read out the voltage, for those who are interested (bat check is very useful to me, even if the MCUs are not so precise at making measurements, be they voltage or temperature)
With an MCU on the board there could be so many more possibilities, with a one-way serial communication protocol, so the master MCU could instruct it how to behave, then go back to sleep.
Not sure what you mean about the Q8 button light having 2 modes. AFAIK the original Narsil does not support that. Is this something that you introduced in the Anduril port, using the internal pullup resistor selection trick ?
FWIW my Astrolux MF01, version 2, that’s the boost driver version with x3 drivers each supplying 6 LEDs in series (Mateminco design) never seems to turn off properly. I haven’t bothered to measure it precisely because the cell carrier makes that difficult, but certainly if you leave it with “dragon breath” running it will flatten four good 18650s in a few weeks, and even if you turn that off, in a few months. Down to a very low voltage (experimented with sacrificial laptop pulls).
But that is a big complex driver, so I suppose it’s owed some standby/sleep current. A serious bit of power engineering. Respect to the anonymous people who designed and made it.
At least it is easily locked out, with a small twist. Otherwise a nice, slightly mad, torch with no practical purpose. With a very basic UI that actually works, although the mode steps are not well chosen, neither is the thermal step down behaviour, but at least it is there. They were trying. But actually built quite well, unlike some others that I could mention. Hardware design good, UI and behind-the scenes stuff not so much, but that could be so easily corrected with some intelligent, even free, input from here.
Man Without Shadow, I merely responded to the ANY IDEAS? Question with a single possibility. The best idea is to leave it alone, preserve the warranty. Anything outside of that, you’re on your own. Even if I happen to have a magical way to pop the press fit bezel, that doesn’t mean someone else would be able to implement it the same way I do without doing damage. And so it goes…