Hi! I hope this is the right place. I’d like to build or have built the brightest possible narrow beam flashlight with 1 or 2 (3 if it had to be that way) batteries side by side. The batteries could be 18650, even more 18350 or 14500. Aspheric or optic or other means are all fine.
I need a spotlight to look in to shadowy spaces outdoors during the day. A 1/2 degree beam would be ideal. 2” at 10’ and 10” at 50’. The brighter the beam the less important a small spot would be. It wouldn’t need to run more than a minute between rests. Since it’s used during the day any spill or even corona is wasted. It would be nice if it could fit in a roomy pants pocket. A small 18650 build is small enough but smaller is better if it maintains usability.
Any ideas on what LED, reflector/optics, host, driver, etc? A ramp would be great if it could be done. Thanks.
Hmm… Try a dedomed XP-E2 in a B158B with a QLITE at 2A. That’s about the best pencil beam you can get that you still can put into your pocket. Anything smaller will have a bigger hotspot and less throw.
I wouldn’t advise on lasers because they are monochromatic, being only one color, and thus won’t be good for spotting objects, only pointing them out.
I’d need at least 3 XPEs. I’ve tried it with one and it’s just not bright enough.
Triple XPG2?
Remember my pockets are big enough to fit an 18650 and maybe 2 side by side. Definitely 2 14500s side by side and probably 2 18350s end to end. I’d like to gather all the lumens of one of the newer LEDs in a small area. With a newer LED I could probably do fine with a 2 or possibly 4 degree beam.
For a 16mrad beam the only way is to use a laser, for the brightness on daylight you need likely 1W of 520nm, just the bare diode cost you 300$ If its not a fake rating or highly overdriven
The thing with those high power greem laser diodes is cooling, the datasheet says operating temp 0-50dC, for 5secs you are fine in a pointer
Could be run from a single 18650 as the diode takes 4.8-5.5V and 1.5A
With 16mrad and 1W you could damage eyes within 20m
18650 with a 1” head or 18650 with a big head?
Because you will 100% not be able to get both a bright beam and half degree divergence with something as small as 1”
So what kind of budget are we talking about here?
Hundreds of dollars? $1k? Less than $50?
Here are two very different lights, the first one produces 1600lm and a pretty large spot, while the second produces a very tight spot with only a few hundred lumens.
Botha re about the same size and shape, but are bigger than a single 18650 flashlight, but still much smaller than the GT.
Good questions. The Mjölnir is an impressive light but out of range size and price wise. Upper limit probably about $120. As far as I know 1STS no longer produces lights. The TN42 is way too big but the beam shots linked to from the link above showed it worked really well.
I’m going to check out the D1s and hope it meets the need.
Good questions. The Mjölnir is an impressive light but out of range size and price wise. Upper limit probably about $120. As far as I know 1STS no longer produces lights. The TN42 is way too big but the beam shots linked to from the link above showed it worked really well.
I’m going to check out the D1s and hope it meets the need.
Here is another very tight beam light, but much larger than the first two I mentioned:
If you want to go smaller than the strike-of-hyperion light then I suggest looking at led lenser, because they are the only ones making flashlight optics that have both high lumens and a thin beam with no spill.
Any other “aspheric” flashlights of this size will not have room for either a precollimator or a wavien collar, so you will be losing a lot of lumens when zoomed in, which means you need to run the flashlight on max and get short battery life.
