Thank you. Yes.
Embarrassing. ><
Please educate me about the PWM in this light and driver. What does “FET+7+1” mean? I confused myself between the drivers in FW1A and the Convoy S2+ I ordered, which is still on the way. I thought maybe FW1A used some 7135, which I think doesn’t necessarily use PWM, but FET always does. Checking just now, looks like FW1A is all FET, no 7135? Thanks.
PWM doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t use the light, but it does mean I won’t use it as a room lamp and bathe myself in ceiling bounced PWM for hours at a stretch. Even if I can’t detect it, I know from experience it leads to painful migraine. I’ll relegate PWM lights for outdoor use only and always pointed away from my eyes.
The numbers refer to groups of 7135 chips.
There is a single one so around 350mAh it uses 1 chip with no PWM. Around 3A it uses 8 chips with no PWM. I guess just below that it might use 7, I forget. Finally, above 3A FET kicks in using PWM except when on Turbo its full FET and no PWM until step down.
Anything in-between, above, below those settings uses PWM of 7135 chips or 7135 chips + FET.
The PWM is very fast and honestly PWM is everywhere these days.
There are better explained posts in other more relevant threads.
Thanks for that, I think I get the idea with your explanation. Happy to see it uses 7135 and there are plenty of spaces with no PWM. I may try using it in stepped ramping to try to figure out which are using PWM.
It isn’t about whether PWM can be seen, but that it is there at all, and what responses it can cause. There is a mistake invariably made by those unaffected by PWM: whether or not it can be seen doesn’t make any difference to whether it can cause pain – with me, at least, in the form of migraine after a certain amount of exposure. Our brains actually pulse with electrochemical energy, and certain frequencies of pulsing light in the eyes will cause discomfort, sometimes just tiring eyes, sometimes headache or migraine, sometimes even nausea. Consider as an extreme counter example to “what you can’t see, can’t hurt you,” is that you cannot detect carbon monoxide with smell or sight, but it will kill you all the same.
So do you get a migraine driving at night or eating out?
I dont doubt your migraines just saying it’s hard to avoid.
The lume1 buckboost driver could be installed in this light for full range of PWM free dimming, better runtime, and slightly higher max sustained brightness. Modding and $20+ driver required.
You don’t understand. Seeing PWM in someone’s tail lights for a minute or 5 is annoying as hell, but doesn’t give me migraine. idk how you use your flashlights, but I use at least one all night long, as a lamp ceiling bounced. I learned the hard way with lights laden with PWM this will cause migraine, and it took me months to eliminate all other possibilities and finger one culprit that advertised no PWM, because it wasn’t even PWM but something similar in the Zebralight SC5w OP. Zebralight changed frequencies or how dim the emitter gets, or something, in the Mk II models, because I’m not getting migraine from SC5c II (and I can see the pulses when certain kinds of flying insects go through the beam, but no migraine, so I don’t care).
All things bring equal, would you choose to have PWM over constant current? PWM is a necessary evil, not something anyone would rationally choose over constant current for its own sake, it serves some other purpose, some other gain skew to the emitter turning off and on 18K times a second. idky it bothers people that don’t mind PWM so much (not saying you, btw, have met others online bereft of empathy) that, it is just a fact, that it bothers many others, and causes real discomfort in some. PWM is not good, not a virtue. It is just something we put up with because we want something that comes with it. If your favorite light has it, you might defend it to the death, many are very loyal to their favorite light. But if that same light happened to not have it, you would not wish that it did have PWM. It is nothing personal. I have lights with PWM and those without. I would prefer PWM never existed. so much so, after the last migraine, I only used direct drive incan for 3 straight years. I only got back into LED a couple months ago, just out of curiosity, to see if drivers had improved. They certainly have.
Well, I did my best to try to detect PWM with the cell phone camera test, and I can’t get it to appear. And the more I use this thing, the more incredible it seems to be. And I have trouble believing the SST-20 model is “only” ~700Lm. It still appears to me to be about 3x brighter than my 475Lm Zebralight SC5c II. Has anyone done a max brightness test on the the SST-20 FW1A? I’m having deja vu just now.
The lockout with mode 2-mode forward clicky is awesome, and the lightning storm and candle modes are just so cool.
How much parasitic drain in FW1A? Everywhere I look simply states, “Low parasitic drain while OFF.”
Accidentally, I removed the post. Here goes again…
Finally, I got the XP-L HI 5000K version of this light with the new reflector everybody’s talking about. Even though, it is different with the ones I saw on many reviews, I still happy about it. I also have checked on Lumintop and they confirmed on the new reflector.
does anybody know if FW1A is available on amazon.ca? i tried searching, couldnt find it, but sometimes they dont list the proper model name for some reason, so im asking just in case…
I have a question for modding / reflowing the fw1a… I just received my fw1a xpl-hi 6500k from BG.
I had plans to reflow an sst40 5000k or osram cslpm1 into this upon arrival. i just took it apart to start with trying the sst40 5000k and was miserably surprised to see a very thick mcpcb… although that is good, i do not have any like it and started modifying mine.
i sanded down a cheaper aluminum mcpcb that i had, removing all of the sticker and traces, then reflow the aluminum mcpcb to the back of my copper mcpcb containing my sst40 5000k. i did a little more sanding on the edges, installed and voila! had a nice neutral 5000k tint sst40…. all the way through the ramping from in ramp to Max ramp.
Once i hit turbo, it turned REALLY blue, and lost about 50% of its output… Was the aluminum mcpcb not enough heatsinking?
So then, i took a different blank copper mcpcb i have, sanded down the sticker and traces, reflowed it to my sst40 5000k mcpcb (to gain the thickness needed) and everything looked good. i installed it and nothing. wouldn’t turn on…
Im at a loss.
I almost left the copper/aluminum hyrbid mcpcb that i made because it looked so good through the whole ramp, but i didn’t leave it because i couldn’t deal with not using turbo. I tried setting parameters in anduril to stop it from going to max amperage, but it just was too much of a limitation…
Any help please? should i post this somewhere else? on its own thread?
thank you.
or does anyone know where to buy blank mcpcb’s the thickness of the one in the fw1a? i think they are 2mm, but of course i was so busy trying to make my reflow work right , i didnt put my calipers on it to actually see.
thanks to anyone who can lead me to where to buy the appropriate 20mm blank mcpcb for this light.
Email Lumintop and ask for a blank FW1A Pro MCPCB.
The other option is send a message to this store on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/usr/jlhawaii808
Your two combined copper PCB’s should have worked but it’s possible you have a short somewhere or just had the LED reversed. To test you put multimeter in “beep”/continuity mode and put 1 tester on each pad and the bottom. Only the center pad should beep with the bottom of PCB.
Thank you contratr! I am going to email them asking for a blank one. So between the mcpcb I created the first time that worked and the second one that didn’t work I did not move or change the emitter at all. I only attached and unattached the second lower “blank” mcpcb. One thing I though of- maybe when I sanded down the second lower mcpcb, I didnt remove the traces abd it caused a short? Unfortunately I don’t have a multi meter, but it’s on the list. Kindve hard to do this work and not have one… you have any suggestions for an inexpensive but decent MM?
Bopper is a seller on etsy that has all sizes of copper and aluminum blank discs. Really good for this kind of thing. I like to have 24, 18, and 14 gauge Cu in 5/8 and 3/4” diameters on hand for modding.
Great to know thank you! Which gauge is closest to 1.5mm, do you know?
14g @ 1.63mm
The other two are 1.02mm and 0.54mm