Definitely room for improvement but when you have a light like the TS10 selling for sub $10 its gonna be hard.
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C’mon… we’re almost there already.
And it might be 50bux, tops.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRQP11HM/
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Hot damn, who doesn’t like a 900000 lumen strobe light right up their faces!
At this point they are just chucking 0’s up there. I’d be surprised it can output more than 250 lumens IRL.
I was actually hoping to find some headlight bulbs - which I recall claiming gigalumen output, claiming more wattage than alternators have to spare.
Be careful! It might back feed into the electrical system and even blow your engine up.
I like this idea. I love Anduril but the whole coding thing scares me off - even though I know it’s probably not that hard if I put the time into learning. The last ‘programming’ I ever did was in Turbo Pascal and HTML in a computer literacy class back in 2001… so yeah.
I like the idea of being able to hook up your light to your PC/mobile and have a GUI that allows you to set all the settings of a UI like Anduril. Basically, it sounds nice if Anduril had a PC component App with a GUI for the less programming-savvy.
To use Andruil you dont need to know how to code much like you dont need to know how fix a car in order to drive it.
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See I knew exactly that someone would respond like this. I kind of covered that already. I know it’s not as hard as it probably really is, it’s just that it “feels” off-putting because it’s all code and stuff. A simple GUI would “feel” simpler for me.
I’m not attacking you, but they way you responded comes off as a little condescending.
You said:
Then I said:
Where in this sentence did I offended you. Dont get me wrong, if I did I apologize but I am looking at this post and not seeing it.
I get it. I avoided Arc4/HDS/Novatac back when those were the shiznit for that very reason.
When I finally dove into Anduril I found the single-button / (usually) single-pixel I/O far from intuitive for configuration. Early on with my first Anduril light I lost track of where I was at one point configuring it and felt like I bricked it - a lot of futzing with it to get it back to a useful config (not sure that factory reset was an option with that version). FWIW, newer versions seem to have obviated this problem.
Suspect that something like a config file could happen at some point (with something like Anduril 3 or another UI built on more capable hardware), which could be built by hand in a text editor - or with a GUI application/website - and loaded onto the light out of band from the user controls.
Oh no don’t get me wrong I’m not offended. I just thought it was funny actually. Well because some people actually don’t even know how to drive cars or never tried because it gives them anxiety to do so lol. No offense was taken, I was just explaining my point of view.
I mentioned the condescending part more of an afterthought
Ok cool, I get it.
Yes this is my thinking. I think if you’re the kind of person who’s able to keep an overview of everything while you’re editing the configuration, I suspect it is not difficult for those people.
But the idea of a configuration file with a even a simple check mark or radio/drop box and fields where you can enter numbers in sounds a whole lot more appealing to me.
I’m not sure what would work best, but I’ve tossed around the idea of maybe using QMK’s XAP protocol since it’s an existing open standard designed for configuring embedded devices which are too small to run a web server, and there will probably be existing apps to talk to it.
Another potential option is copy the method QMK uses for flashing firmware over USB. IIRC it has a bootloader permanently installed on the MCU, and the bootloader can talk to dfutil, a standard firmware update utility which works on many platforms.
Or there are probably other standards which might be useful. Like, it could pretend to be a USB serial device. Or maybe UPDI over an optical connection. Or it could do something custom.
I would really prefer not to write an app, if possible… and just use an existing standard instead.
That’s already mostly how it works… but the web site isn’t very robust yet. Someone already started a project where the user configures their options, it generates the config file, builds firmware, and sends you a .hex file to load onto the light. And when I restructured the code recently, I set it up to make personal config files a lot easier. So… this type of thing is already pretty close.
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Heh, funny you mention QMK, since I’ve designed a few ten QMK PCBs in the past couple of years 
Have you ever checked out how configuring a TS100 works? Imo that’s the nicest and easiest solution for the user - the soldering iron connects as a USB drive to the PC, on which there’s a config file which you can edit.
Downside is, you need a MCU with fairly large flash and computational power to pull that off, I presume, which goes against the need for tiny and low power MCUs in flashlights.
I could see something like the smallest STM32F042 in a flashlight though. Native crystal-less USB peripheral, native DFU mode, and they come in pretty tiny packages.
Maybe it’s a consequence of the uC’s used for these projects and the codebase, but a reflash seems like a high-risk operation for updating the config. But maybe it doesn’t matter to the user so long as the physical connection is solid - the data transfer probably doesn’t take as long as the last time I flashed a PIC controller some ~20 years ago with a RS-232 interface.
It’s pretty quick, about 6 seconds to write/verify for the T1616 builds and 3s for AVR32DD20.
I was thinking it would be faster as the code seems to be measured in bytes. I recall PICs taking ~30s which involved inserting a big DIP package into a latching socket rather than the flashlight driver arrangement of open pads on a PCB.