Hello, newbie here. I was attracted by the “Budget” part of the forum’s name, and the “frugal” part of the tagline.
I like to salvage LED’s from anything free and broken. I recently received 2 of the “free” Harbor Freight 9-LED flashlights with corroded batteries and battery holders.
I took one of them with only minor corrosion, and installed a wire jumper across one of the battery slots to make it a 2-AAA flashlight (instead of 3). Works fine with very usable light. I would think this should also help with the LED life of this flashlight.
It got me to thinking of how to use this with a single AA cell.
The second flashlight was badly corroded, so I yanked the whole circuit board out of the aluminum shell, and put it together with a joule thief circuit and one AA cell, and was very surprised. I’ve built several circuits like this for one LED, but didn’t think I’d get this much light with multiple LED’s.
The whole thing is a bit sloppy, but I think if I had planned ahead a little, I could make it a lot neater and more compact.
What to do with this? Put it in an old el-cheapo flashlight?
