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.
What an excellent pictorial mod thread !
Thanks for taking the time to share your work , and congratulations on your first mod !
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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).
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: […]