Hi everyone. Long time lurker here.
I have a specific project in mind, and I’m a little in doubt if it should be posted here on elsewhere on the site, but here goes.
I want to have an IR (940nm preferred, but if a high-power 8xxnm LED exists it might be OK) flashlight - but it needs to be extremely high power. I also want to put my own firmware on it, so it needs to have some sort of programmable microcontroller ( I have made a low-power prototype with an ATTINY13, but I’m not afraid of JTAGs).
The highest power IR flashlight I have found have usually been ~3, ~5W or 10W single-IR lights (all with a bad single-LED so realistically only 3W), so I believe I might have to buy a high-power “normal” flashlight, and change out the LEDs to IR-LEDs.
However - I haven’t found any very high-power single IR-LED, so I might need to mod a multiple-LED host. However, I’d like as much throw as possible.
Size/battery is not too important - I just want as much IR-light as possible, as throwy as possible 
So here goes my questions:
- Which flashlight host could solve my problems - preferably using LED’s with a somewhat similar forward voltage as available IR LEDs so the driver can be reused.
- Which IR LEDs can be used? Something like Luxeon L1IZ have ~1A forward current (3A burst) at ~2.3-3.4Vf - I’d need ~9+ of these to get something really powerful. I’d prefer if something with more output than ~3W per LED, but does any exist?
- Luxeon IR LEDs are ranted in 50-150deg emission patterns. I assume that 150deg would be best for reflector-based host and 50deg would be best for aspheric/TIR based host?
I hope you can help me find a suitable host/donor flashlight. If something like the SBT-90 existed for 940nm IR lights, I’d probably do a very large single-reflector light, but if I’m limited to ~1A/~3V LEDs, I’l probably need a multi-LED light (preferably with a driver supporting multiple ~3Vf LEDs)
Heat/battery efficiency is not too important for now.
