Richard, I remember a while back you had mentioned some 16340 flashlights possibly coming out on your site. Any news on that? Thanks!
Makes me wonder how they REALLY go about sorting them for binning and tint labeling. I bet it’s a lot sloppier process than we’d imagine, as evidenced by all the variances.
Well, if you look at the datasheet, Cree says "Cree maintains a tolerance of ±7% on flux and power measurements, ±0.005 on chromaticity (CCx, CCy) measurements and ±2 on CRI measurements."
That's 7%, so you're not going to get the exact same output with every emitter.
myst, I have them on hand and am working on the listing and options right now. I have been testing different combinations for the past month or so. Look to see them sometime this evening or tomorrow. I also have the headlamps on hand and am working on those as well; I've had a few friends beta testing the modded ones for me.
It is slower, but I generally test everything I sell for a while before putting it for sale. My goal is reliability. You can't expect the world at budget prices, but I only like to sell products that work well and are a great value. I give test the lights myself, give them to friends to use at work/home, and give them to my father where they are subjected to dust, vibration, heat, and cold as they bounce around in his truck and tractor. If they hold up to a few weeks of that, then they're generally good to go.
I try to always build the lights the way I would build them for myself, knowing that I want a light to last for years and years of use, and to be repairable if it does break. I've strayed away from a few otherwise cool projects and lights because I just couldn't get them to be reliable enough.
I can’t speak for everyone else (although 1925 posts says a great deal) but I find your presence in this forum a major contributing factor. You have become the go-to guy with information, testing, and of course resources. Thank you very much for your ongoing efforts and friendly easygoing helpfulness. Vastly appreciated!
Thank you. I do need to apologize to some of you for my delayed or missed responses to your messages, posts, and e-mails. I've been juggling a lot of different things lately and it is sometimes difficult to keep up with it all. I wish I could contribute more here, but I am always happy to help any of you where I can with questions about your various projects.
Richard, I and others appreciate the time you take testing your products before you sell them, as well as performing mods that myself and others are just not capable of, or comfortable with. I have bought several of your modded lights and each one has performed excellently with absolutely no issues. My reference to “a while back” was not meant to suggest any impatience about seeing the lights listed yet. It was only to put the lights in context - as in something you had mentioned not within the last few days. Thanks for all your efforts!
I have the most amount of experience with XM-L2 U2 1A's, and I've found little measurable difference. Could be 1A's are much tighter than that 7%, but now that they have 1D's and 2C's (maybe more), they can still make the bin range at the low end. Maybe most of mine came from Hank (maybe same CREE batch's?), because of his volume discounts (used to be better), but it seems the 1A's are pretty consistent.
Richard;
Doesn’t a +/- 7% flux and power measurement standard allow a worst case variation of 14% for the outliers at both ends of the measurement. That seems HUGE. I would expect in that case that some light makers would do their own binning to give greater consistency between lights of a given model while others do not bother.
Well, if Richard was not dong a good job these threads would have a whole different tone? 
BTW Richard, I have part of my order on the way, thx! Wish your moded lights had the “now moving into testing phase” online build crap like some laptops. 
Lol, man you should read the whining when laptop seems stuck in one phase…
cheers
Maybe some do, but I doubt it, it's just too labor and time intensive. I'm guessing that the real variation is much less than 7%, but they give themselves some leeway in case of a slightly under or over performing batch of emitters; but of course, this is all just speculation.
The one thing I do know is that most of the budget lights are using what are probably "reject" binned emitters that didn't quite make the cut for one reason or another. I've seen some nasty purple/blue/green tints in these lights that you just don't see in the color binned emitters we buy.
There are a few people on BLF who I pay close attention to, because they have a good nose for items of interest. This thread, and RMM’s store, are both very strong indicators for me. Almost everything discussed here is interesting, and if an item shows up in RMM’s store I know it must be good.
Reliability is GOOD. I spent years working as a reliability engineer at Diablo Systems, A division of Xerox in Silicon Valley. We made printers that were sold OEM to companies like HP and DEC and one of their major concerns was product reliability. The cost of field repair for units was calculated to be a minimum of 10X greater than if the problem was caught in manufacturing. Also reliability issues are a quick way to destroy customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
An automotive guy that worked on the rear "racetrack" lights for the Dodge Charger said they had to match emitters and that added considerably to the cost.
I can't see it being done for flashlights. Would you honestly tell that you sold leaftye flashlights with your best XM-L2 U2's and the rest of your suckers customers got U2's that perform 10% worse? Or if you re-bin your own emitters, which do you discard, and which do you sell? I don't see that going well.
EDC+ was making triples, with a full copper shell silver plated like MattAus’s designs and I think he helped them perfect that. These were P60 drop-ins. They matched the emitters. So time consuming and took so much inventory they quit doing it.
Replace the little black S4 marked diode with a 200 ohm resistor, stack the Zener on the little brown bodied capacitor, just like with the Qlite. (the black diode might be marked 41, it’s to the right of the capacitor, running radially from the battery contact pad towards the outer edge of the driver)
This is what a Zener BLF17DD Z looks like, with everything allowed for right on the board.
With a non zener FET driver, you’ll put the 200 ohm resistor at D1, the Zener on the cap at C1
Have fun!
Just when I got things sorted out, everything has changed.
I got some new 17mm FET drivers from Richard today (you do very neat soldering Richard), and these are on the new BLF boards. (My others were Qlite based).
I want to do a Zener mod, and I’m a little lost. I’m assuming that the capacitor for the Zener diode is the brown component on the spring side, but I’m not sure where I need to swap in the R200 resister. A little guidance would be appreciated.
Thanks
PS: I’m installing an Noctigon mounted XP-E2 onto a copper pill and would like to know the optimal amps I should drive it at.
Thanks DBC.
I found it. It’s marked 41. So just remove and replace with 200?
I have no idea how my post answering you Ouchy got in the forum before the question…
That was me. I was editing and made a boo boo.
I noticed there is no continuity between the 41 diode and the capacitor. On the Qlite based driver there was continuity between the capacitor and one end of the R200 resistor.