[PART 2] Official BLF GT Group Buy thread. Closed, but Public sales open!

[JasonWW]

@Suxelebut

@Kingjohn

@ToyKeeper

As long as people were talking about the driver retaining ring, I just wanted to say thanks to whoever is responsible for making the driver easy to access and reflash without soldering anything. That made my firmware efforts a lot easier.

The Q8 and GT are both easy to reflash without a soldering iron.

Hi TK!

This sounds good and is useful info.
Could you provide a “How to (re)flash a Q8 or GT for Dummies” guide?

Jason already lessoned me for not having the right tools
So I will have to do some upgrades…
What equipment will I have to buy to flash the Q8 and GT?

I really would like to add the candle mode to the Q8.
And with the GT and activated lightning mode I would be able to make people open their umbrellas from 1km distance

Sorry to sound like a noob, but what is reflashing, and what will it do?

Flashing a driver is basically loading new software into MCU, microprocessor control unit, on the driver. The GT and Q8 both use the Atmel ATTINY85 MCU. This process is quite complicated, to the point that even I haven’t tried it yet. Maybe one day, though.

In a nutshell, you can buy a bunch of parts consisting of a very tiny clamp that attaches to the MCU legs, wires and AVR USB programmer all for under $10 typically. Then you load up the program you want to flash on your Mac or PC and whoosh, its reprogrammed.

Simple, right? It’s actually very technical so you have to put in the time to learn all the details. Here are 2 good videos explaining it from Matt at Adventure Sport Flashlights (on the BLF forum as Vestureofblood).

Part 1

How to program an LED driver - High Power LEDs Pt.1

Part 2

How to program an LED driver - High Power LEDs Pt.2

There are also threads here on BLF that talks about it and can give you links to the parts you need to buy.

Guide: how to flash ATtiny13a based drivers (NANJG, QLITE, etc.) with custom firmware

I hope that helps.