My first mod: Nichia 219 in a Convoy S7

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
9

No kidding!!!
I wrote an entire PM to you earlier saying that I am throwing in the towel. I could not figure out how to mount the MCPCBs AT ALL. I soldered the wires, fed ’em through the holes, and tried putting the Noctigons in position, but then the LEDs would not stay under the reflector! I gave up almost!
But then I read someone used thermal epoxy to mount the Noctigons and realized that I was doing it bass-ackwards. Mount the LEDs first, then solder the wires. As it is now, all LEDs are mounted, wired, and the reflector screwed down with no wires shorting out.
Tomorrow I solder up the driver PCB, and hopefully we’ll have a working flashlight.

Once I figured out how to mount the LEDs, I cancelled sending that PM. :smiley:

10

Awesome job!

Do yourself a favor…get a hot air rework station

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C05118I/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For surface mount components and some needle nose tweezers…the soldering is night and day!

Where did you get the stainless Convoy? I see this one from FT…but it doesn’t have that cool clip

11

Someday, could one of you long-termers do a pictoral on your soldering setup?

What I got is okay for repair jobs, but it is bad for doing intense and or delicate jobs. Heck, alls I got to hold stuff is the crummy alligator clip “helping hands” from Harbor Freight.

Right now, I’d seriously pay good money for someone to teach me how to do high-grade mod jobs. Vinh managed to bang out 60 MM15vs in what I guess was less than a week. I can’t manage one M6 in two weeks. He’s talented, sure, but I feel like my whole setup is holding me back most times.

12

Great job!

Pretty ambitious for your very first mod! :slight_smile:

13

That’s a solarforce clip.

14

well done!

15

Excellent mod. I was a little shocked to see you used a good pair of dividers for an unintended use but it appears they survived with no damage. Well done.

16

I used the same method, and it was mentioned in the OP. :slight_smile:
It just took me a few tries to figure out a method which worked. Also, I didn’t know until afterward that the middle pin goes all the way across.

That’s actually why I posted this. It took me forever to finally do my first mod, even after I had decided in detail what I wanted to do. I’m hoping I can help motivate others to take the first step.

Now that I think about it though, I should probably include more details, like pics of the cheapo tools I’m using and maybe some info about where I got everything.

I’ve thought about it… but I decided to start with something cheap as a way of sticking my toe in the water, and I can get something nicer later on if it seems like it’ll be worthwhile. I’m kind of hoping to avoid surface-mount soldering if possible, though I guess the occasional kitchen-stove reflow might be okay if I need to assemble a driver from the oshpark thread.

I got it from FastTech, same as your link. The clip was added later; it’s a Solarforce L2 clip. It’s a little bigger than I’d like, but it does the job. (it fits the Convoy S3 better, but for that you’ll need to cram a paperclip into the tailcap to allow electrical contact)

Oh, the machinist calipers? I got those last year specifically for unscrewing pills and other similar parts. A guy on ebay was selling it fairly cheap and it seemed perfect for the task.

17

That is superbly documented :slight_smile: Thanks!
What tool did you use to desolder and then solder your stuffs?

18

I’ve been looking for a nice pair of dividers.
Nice job on the Nichia build. I’m wondering if the Noctigon didn’t sit flat because of the milling at the corner edges. Maybe beveling the underside edges of the Noctigon would have helped.

19

Oh, and one final mod for the night.

The beam was still less smooth than I had hoped, because the reflector wasn’t designed for a XP-sized emitter. It’s still slightly ringy with a slight dark circle at the edge of the corona. Also, the reflector is deep for its size, so the spill is rather narrow. And since it’s all shiny steel, a lot of light bounces off the bezel to produce a 180-degree wide secondary spill of sorts.

Plus, the tint wasn’t particularly consistent across different parts of the beam. Not exactly ideal for a high-CRI neutral light.

So, I took it apart again and put some DC-Fix on the underside of the lens. That stuff will turn the most crap-tastic beam into a work of art.

It’s now pretty close to perfect, both for indoor use and as a headlight for biking. The main downsides are: stainless steel is heavy, it’s pretty large for an EDC, and the modes go 5% - 50% - 100% with a blink on low to toggle mode groups (so I need to adjust the medium mode down a bit and get rid of the option to add disco modes).

The end result looks a lot like my L3 L10-219, but smoother and much brighter. It’s also a hair cooler in tint (maybe 4600K instead of 4500K), but it still shows colors very well.

20

well done toykeeper!

21

Nice work and report ToyKeeper. Great "how to" resource.

With that Nichia on copper, you don't have to limit current to 1.4amps if you don't want too. I know you did it for the host as stated in the OP, but just in case you change your mind. Djozz did some crash testing and showed that on copper, that emitter can take anything a 18650 can belt out.

22

What an excellent pictorial mod thread !

Thanks for taking the time to share your work , and congratulations on your first mod !

23

I added info and a pic about this to the OP, but it’s mostly cheap stuff from local retail stores. If I decide I need something better, I can get something better later.

Also, I’m currently flux-less. I have an old bottle which is mostly full, but I can’t get the lid off. Even after wrapping the lid with leather and using a large plumbing wrench like I do to break loc-tite, it won’t budge; it just tears up the leather. I think if I squeeze any harder I’ll break the glass. Maybe if I soak it in hot water for a while, I can dissolve some of the dried flux and get it open?

24

I doubt it. I filed the Noctigon down quite a bit to make it fit, and as far as I can tell, the pill itself simply isn’t flat.

I’m getting at least enough thermal contact that the host heats up pretty quickly on medium and high modes.

Thanks, his results are very interesting. I wonder what he’d find with a “real” N219B instead of the one he used, since he thinks it’s probably a different bin with higher efficiency and lower CRI.

Even at 1.4A, I treat the high like a turbo. The emitter is on copper, yes, but it’s floating on a sea of thermal paste with minimal direct contact and the pill is stuck inside an insulating layer of stainless steel. I think the reflector plus old centering ring (butterfly style) are keeping the star pressed pretty tightly against the pill, but I can’t really verify that. Maybe I can get a better idea how effective the heat sinking is if I aim it at my lux meter and watch how much the intensity changes over a few minutes.

25

FWIW, I posted my second mod:

It’s a wide-spectrum Blackshadow Terminator… which is actually a really simple mod, but I like how it turned out.

26

So, fast-forward 2.5 months. Has it really only been such a short time?

Yesterday I got some firmware-flashing tools working, and I wrote my first attiny13a firmware. Today I remembered that I never much cared for the modes on my modded Convoy S7-219B. You can probably guess what happened next.

I had a hell of a time trying to get the old driver out of the pill to flash it. It seems to have been soldered somehow from the inside. No clue how they did that, unless it involved solder paste and some fancy heating tools. So, I ended up destroying the old driver in the process of getting it out. Drove a big drywall screw right through the center and yanked it out, and even then just barely.

Fortunately, I had a brand new qlite driver laying around with no specific purpose in mind so I replaced the old driver with that. But instead of 4x350mA chips (1400mA total), I configured it for 5x380mA (1900mA total). That’s about 36% more power than the old driver. I’ll definitely have to treat the highest level as a “turbo” now instead of just “high”. The maximum mode has increased from about 255 lumens to 342 lumens.

I also flashed some custom firmware (based on JonnyC’s “STAR” on-time firmware) I just put together today, and then re-flashed a few times as I tweaked the moon level. The new modes are:

  • Moon: 0.14 lumens
  • Low: 7.3 lm
  • Med: 42.4 lm
  • High: 155 lm
  • Turbo: 342 lm (and it drops pretty quickly, probably due to heat)
  • Moon-low flasher: Using “moon” as a baseline level, it will flash up to the “low” level about once per second, in four very quick pulses. So, it’s like moon with a 1Hz mini-strobe at one brightness level higher.
  • Low-med flasher: Same, but with brighter levels.
  • Med-high flasher.
  • High-turbo flasher.
  • Heartbeat strobe: Blinks twice quickly at “turbo” for just 1ms, then goes dark. Repeats about once per second, to mimic a 60bpm heartbeat.
  • 10Hz strobe: Blinks for 1ms on “turbo” at a rate of ten times per second. Can be disorienting, but it’s more fun for just making people feel like they’re walking around in a bad horror movie. With the light only on for 1ms at a time, people see a series of still frames with no apparent motion.
  • Variable strobe: Ramps continuously back and forth between about a 6Hz strobe and about 60Hz. The entire cycle takes about 5-6 seconds to loop. Each flash is only 1ms, so it appears to freeze motion. Point it at a spinning fan and it’ll make the fan appear to stop, change directions, slow down, stop, change directions, etc.

That’s a total of 12 modes, but I don’t have to cycle through them all. It uses short-cycle memory, so it basically acts like it doesn’t have mode memory at all. As long as the light has been on for more than one second, the next tap will always take it back to moon mode. Tap twice (with no more than a second between taps) and it’ll go to low. Tap three times for medium. And so on. To reach the last mode, the user must tap twelve times, so it’s not generally going to happen by accident. The most useful modes are at the beginning in low to high order, and there is no need to ever go through the other modes unless the user wants to.

Low-voltage detection and step-down is also implemented, but I haven’t actually tested it yet. I configured it to drop the output by half each time the voltage gets low, then shut itself off (lowest-power standby) if it was already at the lowest mode. I’m pretty sure it won’t “do the right thing” if it was in a flashing or strobe mode when it went low-voltage though, so I should probably fix that if I can find a few more bytes to fit extra code.

It seems like the reflector rides a bit high above the emitter, and I suspect that’s why I’m getting 342 lumens instead of 450. However, the reflector is designed so it can’t really go any lower — it has a ring around the outer edge which pushes directly against the pill. I at least got it to hold the emitter star down with a XM-L butterfly spacer, which puts a paper-thin gap between the reflector and where it wants to rest on the pill. But for more output it really should be lower.

As for the moon mode, I tried a few different PWM values… a value of 8 produced 3.26 lumens, 7 produced 1.14 lumens, and a value of 6 gave me 0.14 lumens. I was hoping for something closer to 0.3, but I think 0.14 will work better than 1.14. So, that’s where I left it.

If anyone wants the firmware, I’d be happy to share the source and/or compiled .hex file. I might add it to my firmware repository too, for reference.

Overall, I like this Convoy S7-219B a lot better now. It had awkward modes before, mode memory, a mode-group blink on “low”, and PWM slow enough for me to see (4.5 kHz). But now it has better modes, no visible PWM, and no need to cycle through extra modes to get to the level I want. And some fun extras after the primary modes.

27

Hi again. There’s new firmware available for this light.

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~toykeeper/flashlight-firmware/trunk/files/head:/ToyKeeper/s7/

The changes are:

  • Added a battery check mode at the end of the sequence.
  • Three dual-level flashers instead of four, and a wider spread between the high and low levels for each.
  • 10Hz / 24Hz / 60Hz strobes, and the latter two are an even shorter flash for freezing faster motion.
  • Two variable strobes instead of one, at different speed ranges.
  • General code improvements.

Really, the big thing is the battery check mode. It’ll blink zero to five times to represent remaining charges of roughly 0, 25, 50, 75, 100, and > 100.

Also, the low-voltage behavior is probably a little more reliable now, but I haven’t tested it yet. Since many of the modes don’t really have a way to “step down” as such, it just drops directly to the ‘moon’ mode. If the voltage is then still too low, it’ll shut off. I might change this so it drops to ‘low’ instead, since moon might be really really really dim on a low battery. So, not ideal, but it’s still better than “stepping down” from the low beacon to the highest solid mode (which it used to do).

28

If you do get one, make sure you read the reviews. This seems unfortunately typical:

—-quote follows—
This is a great product at an amazing price, but is potentially DEADLY as shipped.

Make sure to check that your gun (you know, the 700watt device in your hand) is properly grounded. Mine WAS not.
Here is a video on how I fixed it: […]