Most powerful single cell(18650/26650) light

LED Flashlights – General Info
1

Whats the most powerful single cell 18650 or 26650 light available?
Or what driver can supply the most current to the Led(s) from a single cell if i was to DIY a light?

Cheers
Matt

2

Lumens or Kcd?

3

I’m thinking along the lines of whats the maximum possible current, and potential lumen output a single cell light can draw(using the appropriate cell).

If you were to direct drive say 3 Led’s, would you need to wire them in parallel to spread the current across them?

I’m thinking of something like the Shadow SL3 made into direct drive, or using a 9A single cell driver if possible. That’s if the 9A SL3 doesn’t happen of course :slight_smile:

Cheers
Matt

4

Yeah, parallel would be the way to go. One could jam a lot more than 3 LEDs in it though *cough 7 cough*

5

:bigsmile: LED-TECH.DE Online Shop

But it says 3A max? Does that mean they are wired in series, and not suitable for direct drive? It does say 7280 lumen max though :bigsmile:

6

VannisleDSM Quad xpg2 dropin pulls 5.6 amps with an imr18650 and generates 1700+ lumens floody and awesome.
I had the r5 xpg quad and it was roughly 1600 lumens on initial startup. Not a lot of runtime but wow it was a fun dropin for my bored Surefire C2

7

Then of course there’s also those Septa heads DSM made, crazy powerful but I don’t have the money

8

Yeah that one is in series, so you would need 7 li-ions. :(

9

For only a hundred bucks!

Group buy?

10

When my fr4 board in parallel only costs like 2 dollars each (including shipping to my house) no thanks. :P

11

Yeah, the DSM drop-ins and Septa were nice :slight_smile:

12

That’s a shame, it could have been serious fun :slight_smile:

13

But the one from led-tech is massive copper..^^

By the way, IIRC, PilotPTK designed your board? Did you guys talk about how much the difference in thermal conductivity is between your board with thermal vias and a copper one?

14

Between fr4 and copper? No, however when asked about the difference between aluminium and fr4 with lots of vias he assured me it was fairly minimum. He said Cree has done lots of testing on it.

http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/Cree/LED%20Components%20and%20Modules/XLamp/XLamp%20Application%20Notes/XLamp_PCB_Thermal.pdf

Just in case you are getting to comfortable with the idea of this much heat in such a small place here a direct quote from him is: "P.S. This is a really terrible idea I don’t even know if the circuit board traces will be able to handle the current if you drive this well."

15

Yeah, as if we needed anyone to know that all of this is a really terrible idea. :D

16

:smiley: Telling you this is a really terrible idea is even more encouragement to do it :slight_smile: