While the UI offers a lot of good things. Because it is thermally regulated, the lights it is used on seem to continually dim when you ramp up the brightness.
I’m finding this a real issue in trying to use some of the lights with Anduril. As there is no way to go to a high brightness that will remain fairly stable. It is all imprecise guess work, requiring you to pump the switch multiple times going up and down the ramping. In the vane hope you hit an output that won’t dim or that Saturn is aligned with Venus and it’ll remain stable while you are trying to use the damn thing!
e.g.
Out for a walk or over the fields. I just want to turn the light on and use the sodding thing. I don’t want to have to be continually adjusting it up and down. Anduril seems to offer no user solution for this that I can see. It needs an easy to activate way of letting you set the highest output it can actually sustain (at least for a number of minutes rather than a handful (5) seconds).
Messing about with my lightbox and meter I have seen some odd behviour. My D1 mini (SBT90.2) will dim all the way down to 200 lumens from a middling highish output. Even when the torch is cold to the touch. After resetting it I did get it hold a semi stable 830 lumens. But this required me cycle the light (the auto memory turned it back on at the same output mode/ramp). First activation it dropped to just under 500 lumens, cycling the light it held at 830 lumens. Which is quite annoying. Although without a lightbox it is impossible to find this part of the ramp by eye. If you start higher it just drops quicker and lower.
My KR1 (W2) is similar, although oddly that will with a bit of fiddling settle at 900 lumens. Should the tiny Osram really be able to sustain a higher output than the large SBT90.2? Although the KR1 seems to get quite a bit hotter (both running default thermal settings).
My FW21 Pro (triple XHP50.2) offers higher stable output of 1200 lumens. But still requires you to fiddle about with the ramping to find the ‘sweet spot’ to stop it dimming below this level.
By comparison. My stock Convoy M1 XM-L2 you can just turn on and it’ll happily sit there pumping out 630 lumens and barely get warm at all. No f*cking about what so ever!!!
More impressive, my Zebralight SC600w IV (XHP50.2) will maintain a monster 1960 lumens without dimming (despite massively less thermal mass than the D1 Mini or KR1). It does start to get a bit warm, but hasn’t needed any faffing about, no thermal config. Just turn it on and use it. If it gets too hot I can always turn it down. Why can’t I do the same with my Anduril lights??
It would be nice if the user could calibrate in the UI how aggressively the thermal temp regulation steps down. Perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a very mild step-down and 10 being aggressive.
As-is, I agree Anduril’s temp regulation often steps down too aggressively for my tastes. Unfortunately, there is no way to fix it without modding the code.
I’ve also noticed that Zebralights seem to have the best temperature regulation. They ramp down very gradually… over minutes instead of seconds. And they stabilize at a very high output compared to Anduril lights without the light becoming too hot to touch.
As you have discovered, Anduril lights offer Turbo outputs that are not sustainable. And once the light is overheated by Turbo, the thermal regulation will drop the output to a much lower level.
I find that if I turn off Turbo, and use a ceiling of 110/150, I get close to a sustainable output. Without overheating the light first, and triggering thermal step down.
I’m not talking about turbo or even using it. I’m talking about the ramping mode. That you can’t just “select” high output and get on with what you are doing, the light will dim. And the higher you start the lower it seems to dim. So you have to mess about ramping it up a bit, then down a bit to try and find the spot that it sort of remains stable.
I still want High and Turbo, else there is often little point in buying the lights in the first place. So I don’t want to disable these. But the more I use Anduril the more it seems unfit for purpose. Even in larger hosts like an Astrolux EA01 or FT03 the lights will dim long before the actual body even starts to get warm.
It is a very frequent problem especially if you have not made a precise setting of the temperature sensor.
I recommend that you calibrate the temperature sensor after the flashlight has been thirsty at room temperature for some time.
I advise you to perform the thermal setting quickly, because during this operation the torch heats up and the setting could be distorted.
Then I suggest you set the stepdown temperature to 50 or 55 degree celsius for more stable performance.
Even after the correct thermal setting, Anduril is very aggressive in cutting the current.
Unfortunately, very small flashlights with very powerful LEDs such as SBT90.2 heat up very quickly and it is impossible to use them with very high outputs, it is better to choose more efficient LEDs such as xhp, because the flashlight is much more usable.
Messing about with the settings is a very poor user experience. I have done so. That said, I struggle to see even if the temp sensor was a couple of degrees wrong, it shouldn’t make such a HUGE performance impact. and would suggest something is fundamentally wrong with either the software, hardware or both.
And you are missing my point… I’m not talking about running the LEDs hard. I’m talking about how as a user can I get the best high output from the light. The Anduril UI does not allow the user to do this at all. Yet is a basic standard offering on pretty much all other UI’s.
It also massively dims when not driving the LEDs hard, even after resetting and messing about with the config settings. Across multiple flashlights and 3 different brands.
Yes Anduril is no the best choice for thermal management, but this thing is known, several reviewers have talked about it.
You speak about total lumen output and the way to get better returns with Anduril is to turn up the stepdown temperature.
I did it on my IF25A Anduril 1 and TS21 Anduril 2 and I can achieve constant performance for a long time at level 7.
I set the stepdown temperature to 65C ° because I place the flashlight on the helmet, but this setting is not good if you have to keep the flashlight in your hand.
However, there are no other alternatives, if you want to have better yields with Anduril you have to choose larger torches with better yields LEDs (as XHP).
If you read my review on the Wurkkos TS21 I am talking about this problem and how the only way out is to increase the stepdown temperature.
Calibrate the temp after sitting a good long while. Raise the max temp to 50 or 55 as stated before. In step mode run the light 2 or 3 steps down from top of ramp. Find what the light can handle and then set top of ramp to approximately that level. That’s about all you can do. Or set top of ramp to max and set manual memory to your sustainable level.
I look at runtime charts, to get a ballpark of the Sustainable Output
looking at this Zebralight runtime chart
I can see the Zebra could sustain about 30% of initial output (this is a typical ballpark) .
Zebra weight 109 grams, sustainable output about 600 lumens, that is about 5.5 lumens per gram
Here is an FW21:
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it has a Turbo of over 9000 lumens, but its sustainable output is only about 10%, 944 lumens at 30 seconds.
Weight is 184g with cell, that is about 5 Lumens per gram
Using 5 lumens per gram to guesstimate Sustainable Ouput of my Wurkkos TS10, that weighs 52 grams w battery and clip, would predict 260 lumens sustainable… That is actually very close to my experience.
That one wasn’t calibrated, only on recent reviews he calibrates Anduril lights, hence on some older reviews you get abnormally low results like those.
thank you. I was only looking the middle of the chart… it still seems to follow the lumens per gram formula
I researched the weight and runtime graph of another light mentioned by the OP:
Emisar D1, 150 grams, at 5 lumens/gram would predict Sustainable output of about 750 lumens
this review
suggests a sustainable output of about 600 lumens: (or slightly more if the light was not first overheated by Turbo) .
it seems Sustainable Output is highly correlated with Host Weight
Thanks for providing such great answers to the OP's question, I'd like to touch on why this happens: I think the problem stems from people buying lights with unrealistically large lumen outputs.
When I look at the manufacturer's charts (Fenix, for instance) and see the light is not immediately taking a lumen nose-dive and instead remaining pretty stable I can evaluate how useful the high-output modes are compared to the head size. If the manufacturer chart shows the light is immediately ramping down I know the LED is not attached to a large enough heat sink. Hopefully Turbo lasts 1.5 to 5 minutes before ramping down, often it does not, and I consider the lumen rating done for marketing purposes.
If a manufacturer doesn't provide charts (Sofirn, for instance) there's almost always an instant ramp-down.
Here's a chart where you can expect the light to come on bright and immediately dim to something usable:
Let's pick on Sofirn a bit, because they earn every "lackluster-lumen" mention they get:
I don't have issue with the SF14 flashlight running for 7 hours at 50 lumens...
It seems the claim of it being a 600 lumen flashlight is technically "true" in that it can make 600 lumens for 1/2 second, though it's not a usable 600 lumens, more like a usable 50 lumens.
I bought several Lumintop Tool AA 2.0 lights, Lumintop claims 650lm. Depending on which version and what point in production you get, they're usually 105% rated output, a review on BLF has the v2 Ti at 974 initial, but no graph. What??? Crazy, right? Out of an AA-size light! Here's a graph from ZeroAir showing 1150 initial and 956lm at 30s:
It hits 600lm after about 14 minutes! Not 1.4 seconds, 14 minutes! This is why I gave them out as gifts!
Usually lights are useful -in my opinion- in High instead of Turbo as that's sustainable, though the Tool AA sure blows that out of the water. I didn't know all this detail until joining BLF, just that they're really bright and "somewhat funky" lights. When they were on sale for $18 delivered...what a deal! Anyway, that's my point, Lumintop scored a lot of points with me for being honest about that little light.
Yeah, I feel your pain! We (BLF) really need to think about a solution to that, but i think it incorporates a 2nd physical switch to make it easy. (sideswitch and tailswitch ?)
Otherwise we still keep on clicking, and we’ll get even more annoyed when we have a timing mismatch or a click too many or too few.
Anduril is too difficult to operate in situations when a high reaction speed is needed, especially when you have too much flashlights with different UI’s
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