What driver would be best to use, I am planning to use a 18650 batteries and preferably have less than 6 batteries in total as it is going to be mounted on my head and due to weight for long times (6-10 hours) (will carry spare batteries in an external bag), sort of like these head torches (Amazon.co.uk). I don’t mind if it is a boost or a buck converter as it will just change the batteries to series or parallel, would prefer a driver that has low battery protection and alerts in advance in some form or dims, going to be used underground. Been looking through Taskled and can’t see any difference between the boost and buck so wondered what would be better for my application and if there are any drivers that I have missed that would be more applicable for the application.
Copper is the best heatsinking material next to aluminum, then brass. Avoid steel. I start with PC heatsinks for my custom builds with copper cores.
For a driver, if you’re doing 4S for the 12v emitter, you can do a buck driver. There are lots from China that deliver good output. Or Lexel makes nice ones too and so does TaskLED. I recommend a buck at around 2A for the best run times because the light output is linear and regulated until the battery gets low. You won’t be pushing the led too hard either. Make sure you have some sort of cooling for the driver though.
With the 3V and the parallel MCPCB , would that mean that I would need to still be looking for a 12V converter or would it be a 3V system with 9A draw. (I believe it would be the second one). Would this mean that i dont need the cells in series but in parallel?
