The Lumintop Ant Man having no driver at all has fairly disappointing performance, the Laser diode is directly wired to the cell, hence the output is completely dependent on the cell voltage and the laser diode forward voltage, which varies widely, members here have measured the current with a fully charged cell varying from 0.4A to 1.5A, and then it decreases as the cell discharges. . It also doesn’t have low voltage protection and will drain a cell below safe levels.
Constant current, 3 drive current options selectable via solder jumpers : 1.5, 1.75 and 2A.
Low voltage protection, Reverse polarity protection.
Price will be between 15 and 25€. If you are interested please leave a comment stating so in this thread, depending on the quantity I will assemble them myself or have them made by an assembly service.
This turns a joke into something really cool. This is what I've been waiting for for a long time. This is the reason why I bought an Ant Man, and it's what the Ant Man should've been in the first place.
After thefreeman's perfect opening post, I believe most of us don't need a more elaborate explanation of why this makes a huge difference. But just in case some people don't understand the importance of this, here it is:
The Ant Man doesn't just use a bad driver, it uses no driver whatsoever. So it's direct drive. Why is that an issue, after all direct drive flashlights are often the most powerful ones out there? Well, it's an LEP, using a blue laser diode instead of an LED. And while LEDs are often fine with being directly driven (as seen in FET drivers), it still means no regulation whatsoever. But what if, with the correct driver for the job, you can actually get more performance than with direct drive? That's what this driver does with the Ant Man.
Blue laser diodes have a very high forward voltage, which also varies quite a lot from one unit to the next and also depends on temperature. This means that most Ant Men (?) are actually not performing the best they can no matter what you try, just because the forward voltage is so high the li-ion cell voltage isn't enough to push the required current through the laser diode to achieve maximum performance. And even the best performing ones only do so with a fully charged battery sitting at the highest acceptable voltage since output drops quite a lot as the battery discharges even a bit.
This driver changes that by pushing a constant current through the laser diode (which is the way laser diodes are supposed to be driven, directly driving them from a battery is a very lazy and bad way to do it as we now have learned). So with this upgrade, your Ant Man might get a significant performance boost and (almost more importantly to me personally) will maintain this higher performance until the battery is pretty much empty.
tl;dr if you have an Ant Man and you have basic soldering skills (or know someone that does), get this driver!
thefreeman, thank you again for your work on this, and putting up with my constant nagging for so long. I wish I could get 10 just to jumpstart this, but money is tight so I'm only in for one.
Anyway you can setup a deal with Nealsgadget or some other shop to sell these premodded? If that’s the case, I will probably buy a few Antmans with your driver.
I don’t know, you’ll have to check what it has and if it’s just a contact board like in the original Ant Man, its dimensions, diameter is 16.6mm.
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Further disassembly required? lol. Not sure what to look for. The Ti has low/high/strobe and is higher power from specs anyway. Would love to drive this thing even more lol.
::Edit:: I'll measure it with calipers when I get to work tonight.
Oh so it has an actual driver, depending on the components used it the drive current could be increased without having to replace the driver.
Edit : has anyone asked Lumintop if the Ti driver fits the original Ant man (the diameter looks the same) and if it could be bought as spare part ? Because in the specs the output is stated as 8.4W, which depending on the Vf is probably 1.7~2A.
That looks actually good, using the MP3431 which is kind of overkill for this purpose. There is a current sense resistor (white) behind the red wire, decreasing the value of this resistor will increase the current, how much the LEP module can take is kind of unknown though.
For that you would need to know the original current, it can be measured with a current clamp by lengthening one of the wires.
Another way is to measure the voltage across the sense resistor (Vsense), knowing the sense resistor value with the markings : Iout = Vsense / Rsense
Then NewRsense = Iout x Rsense / newIout
Or NewRsense = Vsense / newIout (same thing)
So now I’m wondering if I should bother with providing a driver, that is if Lumintop is willing to sell the TI one separately.
Do you think the inductor will be small enough for the regular Ant Man? The Ti version might have a larger driver cavity, no idea. The Ti head looks a bit longer though.
Well that looks like a 4020 inductor (~2mm tall), the same size as the one I used in my prototype, which touches the pill (~1.9mm cavity), I don’t know if they increased the free height, but even if it touches the pill it should work.
Is that a boost driver in the Lumintop TI? If not maybe you can talk to Lumintop to use your driver in a special version of the Ant Man. Lumintop made the FW3X using the LUME1 driver.
