NightWatch Avaritia NA40

[JasonWW]

@aors10

@Tom E

Got my original NA40 updated with a piggyback’ed 17mm DEL driver running NarsilM - really nice now. Didn’t take apart the switch but tied the red and green wires to the LED pin #3 and seems like I only got one working LED in there - seems to be RED but looks orange. In room light it appears only on one side of the switch but in the dark it’s a definite orange and looks consistent throughout the switch - I like it .

It’s a nice quality light all around - love the anodizing, SS bezel, square threads and separate charging circuit. At best I got about 17.5 amps out of it, 5950 start, 4980 30 secs (my lumens). Losing about 1000 lumens in 30 secs is excessive for sure. Not sure what’s going on there - thinking the MCPCB mounting is not ideal. Maybe it’s not tightly pressed down by the reflector, not sure.

The biggest issue I have is the weird battery tail (negative contact) setup. It’s the oddest setup I’ve ever seen. It seems like a spring is just simply missing? stock LK’s rattle and can’t make contact. Typical magnets on the tail are too small in diameter — totally weird stuff. Why??? Hope they fixed this up in the SE upgrade? I use solder blob top LK’s with a magnet off centered on the tail - not ideal but no rattle and it basically works.

I stripped the stock driver to use as a contact board, epoxied the 17mm on top. Looks like the MCU is a ATTiny84, 14 pin surface mount, and some of the cap and resistor design closely matches the DEL driver designs. The 16 7135’s are divided into banks, at least 3, maybe 4-5, not sure. Because the 84 has a ton of I/O pins, it makes it easy to do and you can optimize your mode sets to be full sets of 7135’s at max output - no PWM’s. I almost considered air-wiring in a ATTiny85 to use the existing 7135’s and FET’s, but would be a challenge for me.

Wish I knew the details of exactly what they changed in the SE model - for example “improved switch”, well, what was improved? Could it be it stood out too far and was too stiff? Why was the reflector swapped and what’s the advantages? I could speculate maybe it frees up space for the wiring - they had to epoxy up the exposed wires, so maybe there’s some true interference going on there, maybe resulting in a poor MCPCB bonding to the shelf. Shame because it’s a really nice light, great for modding. It’s like a 26650 version of the C8F, but nice charging setup, better quality body, though the C8F isn’t bad at all. The driver size of 32 mm is non-standard for us, sorry to say — no one on BLF makes a 32 mm, or one that can be tailored to 32 mm as far as I know, but the piggyback works well.

Even with the issues, they are relatively minor. The original NA40 is a nice light for the money - I don’t regret buying this one. The NA40SE hopefully improves on or eliminates these shortcomings.

Where did you buy this NarsilM driver?

Appearantly DEL built it for him. He made it himself based on Del’s design.

If you want to buy one ready to go you can see Lexels thread on them.