So have you tried bypassing with a wire yet??
Not yet as I don’t have found an appropriate wire yet and I’m not back home yet. But I will try the advice with the coin asap. :-)
(just noticed too many „yets“...LOL :-D )
It will be a lot easier to just take a piece of wire and short the negative and the tube end, you will get your answer before you start trying to insert spacers and stuff…. Just saying 
Yeah, that makes sense indeed! ;-) I‘ll probably get ahold of some desoldering braid by tomorrow. Would this work to check if the MR30 can use the turbo below 3.9V without the tailcap?
Once again, I really appreciate your great help and your patience with me, guys! :-)
If you have a piece of electrical cord laying around, like a kettle or pc power cord, just strip it and remove one of the cores. A 1.5mm² wire can comfortably handle 16A. If you press it firmly against the negative terminal and the tube end you can run turbo. I’ve done it with my MR70 when I measured tailcap current in turbo. I measured 9A at startup with a fresh cell. The MR30, in theory, should draw about 6A at startup in turbo with a fresh cell.
Sorry I haven’t got to this yet. It’s deer season here (Started this morning) and my kid is wearing me out. Just havn’t had a chance to do any testing yet. Didn’t want you to think I forgot about you.
No worries HONDARIDER! :-)
I must admit I didn’t get to test those suggestions yet either as I was kept busy with family business and family always comes first. I‘ll probably do this by tomorrow and report about my results.
Alright, next update:
At first, I did what Banggood's customer service asked me to do: They asked me to check if I can charge the MR30 with the battery inside. I did this both with the protected Rofis 21700 and with an unprotected Sofirn 21700 battery. With the latter one inserted the voltage did not rise when being attached to the powerbank, even after an hour. This video shows the MR30 with the unprotected Sofirn 21700 battery inside:
However, the MR30 can be operated via USB power even without the battery inside as you can see on the picture below.
Next, I tried to add more tension to the spring to see if this would have an effect both on the contact resistance, the turbo drops and the usage of unprotected 21700 batteries.
Effect:
- With the Euro Cent or two small size magnets attached the MR30 did power up with the unprotected 21700 battery at 3.77V but also failed to maintain the turbo level.
- With the Euro Cent or two small size magnets attached the MR30 and the protected Rofis 21700 battery inside at 3.86V the turbo worked for about 5 seconds before the MR30 stepped down to low. It did not turn off as without those spacers.
Conclusion:
The MR30 works a little bit better with more tension onto its springs but still fails to operate on turbo level even at moderate voltages like 3.8 - 3.9V. Unprotected batteries will work with spacers attached but with the downside of having additional contact resistance due to those spacers.
Next, I tried to bypass the tailcap with a short wire as suggested before. Please excuse my shaky hands and my amateurish approach to do this. It was my very first attempt to do this. ;-)
As you can hopefully see, the MR30 shows the same odd behaviour even when bypassing its tailcap. So, I hope that might help to pinpoint the root cause for the actual problem. I presume the reason must be found in the driver which again is out of my reach both physically (due to a glued battery tube) and technically.
I really appreciate your feedback on this guys. Thanks!
Cheers,
Thomas
What scares me here is that the root of the problem can be traced back to one crucial component in the circuit: the inductor.
A badly soldered inductor can cause problems at higher power levels because of a bad solder joint, like in my stock driver in my Haikelite MT01: the inductor actually slightly mechanically got separated from the solder, and wouldn’t work, until I replaced the driver.
I then inspected the original driver, and saw that the inductor was slightly lifted on the side(very slightly). I then pushed the inductor while connected to a 6V LED and my power supply.
Behold, the driver was working again! Only on low modes though, before it shut off because of “LVP”.
I then resoldered the inductor, and everything was working fine.
TLDR: Either the inductor is badly soldered from the factory, or it got damaged during shipping. They should be giving you a half refund for that, since turbo isn’t working like it should.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts BlueSwordM! :+1:
I’ll have Banggood evaluate the latest updates on this issue and maybe they are gracious enough to offer a refund. So far, my previous experience with them is rather disillusioning.
Wow was gonna get the MR30 , now I don’t think so. When I first got the 70 , step down from turbo was almost immediate. Saw on here to try cleaning contacts , and did. Still immediate step down. I was too lazy to try returning. I liked the side light so much , I was willing to put up with it. After recharging a few times , it started to work properly. So , I got the MR50 to add to my 21700’s. It has been fine. ( step off turbo at 1 to 1+ minutes )
After seeing how poorly their customer service is , I don’t think I want to risk another purchase of their products.
Next round:
After I informed Banggood's CS team about the latest insight they now asked me this:
"[Sorry excuses excluded]
Is is possible for you to change the battery locally so the device will work normally?
[Sorry excuses excluded]"
Well, I don't think they understand what the real problem is about or is it just me not understanding their answer? I'm afraid they think the battery is the faulty item, not the flashlight. I replied again that it doesn't matter what battery I put in. The turbo will not work properly and starts to kick out even when reaching 4.0V already, maybe because of a faulty inductor on the driver. Unprotected batteries won't work unless artificially extended by spacers which is not a solution of the problem.
Next update (11/13/2018):
Banggood's CS team replied back to me:
"[Sorry excuses excluded]
We are sorry for the situation, But we received the reply from our supplier and they told us that the Turbo mode requires the battery voltage over 3.9V. So the voltage in the video is not enough. Can you try battery over 3.9V to see if the issue will be resolved?"
[Sorry excuses excluded]"
I summarize:
- Rofis couldn't care less of my obviously defective MR30. Their 5-years warranty is not worth the paper it is written on. They don't even respond to my objection that it is anything but usual that my MR30 will only work with protected cells as unprotected don't even seem to get electrical contact. In contradiction to several reviews of the MR30 where turbo worked until the battery's become more or less depleted Rofis also tells me their boost driver can only handle the turbo mode until 3.85V (please keep this figure in mind!) no matter what type of battery one puts in. At this voltage the MR30 is even prone to shut off, they told me!
- Banggood now keeps on bullying me with more and more videos that will not help to sort out the mistakes of this flashlight I have bought from them. They don't seem to pay attention anymore to the fact that my MR30 will not work with standard 21700 batteries whereas everyone else who bought the MR30 reports it is capable to use them.
- Banggood now tells me that Rofis told them the turbo only works when voltage is higher than 3.9V....wait a second....3.9V? Do you remember what Rofis told me in their reply? Yes, 3.85V. So, now they keep telling me the turbo only works until voltage reaches 3.9V and insist to get a video proving that the turbo will not work when above 3.9V.
Now, I'm asking myself where this BS is supposed to end?
I don't know if PayPal will side with me in this situation as it will be hard to prove that it is unusual for a flashlight to stop working properly when a battery is 75% full and it will also be difficult to judge about Rofis' advertisement that the MR30 works with 21700 batteries without to mention a slightest word about the small but important discrepancy that it only works with extra long, protected batteries. Those batteries are hard to get and Rofis does not even offer single batteries for sale.
I guess I call it 'lessons learned'!
That blows !
Hi Thomas,
I suggested you should try the tube short experiment using the unprotected cell. You clearly used the Rofis Protected cell. You should also try and exert more pressure on the wire. It does seem to me that you have higher than usual resistance in your light, and that indicates springs or the Rofis protected cell. Having stepdowns from Turbo with a cell with a resting voltage of 3.7 to 3.8 V is normal.
Obviously, people will say the get Turbo from lower resting voltages. Mine does too… But it is definitely not the 1600 lumens that you would get from a fully charged cell.
So your light does not charge the Rofis cell inside the light? Up to a point where the light turns green??
And if you can fully charge the cell, what is the internal resistance??
At 3.68V I measure 21.92 Ohms. Will report back on a fully charged cell.
Hi Kevin, thanks for your help and yes, I was probably wrong using the protected Rofis battery instead of one of those unprotected 21700s. Sorry about that. I will try to repeat this with unprotected ones as well but it will not help me to get things resolved by Banggood or Rofis (see latest updates above). Actually my MR30 will not even activate the turbo in many cases when voltage is lower than 3.9V, i.e. no step-down but immediate shutting down as can be seen on my videos. I must admit, I'm beginning to lose my interest to put any further efforts and investigation into this.
The Rofis cell will be charged inside the MR30 when using the USB-cable, any unprotected cell will not. I can try to measure the impedance of the Rofis cell but for the internal resistance I do not have any equipment here and probably not the math skills, too. :-D
Doesn’t the multimeter that you used for testing voltage have an Ohm scale?
So at 4.168V I’m measuring 33.36 Mega Ohm. Made an error in my previous message, it was 21.xx Mega Ohm.
That immediate shutdown of your light looks like the protection tripping on the Rofis cell. Lower cell voltage means increased current needed from the cell to supply the amount of power the driver needs to run Turbo. I have had this issue with protected cells in the past. That’s why I’m curious to see what happens with a fully charged UNPROTECTED cell when you PROPERLY bypass the tail cap with a wire.
I think the reason why BG/Rofis are so adamant for more proof is that your tests don’t indicate to a driver problem. I might be wrong, but I am on my 2nd MR30 and I have stripped the 1st one. I showed them all my tests and they didn’t hesitate to send a new light. And the only weak part is how sensitive the driver is to supply circuit impedance. So not really a driver problem, but a design problem. Something that can clearly be tested by cleaning contacts or bypassing the bottlenecks. The only way to combat the voltage drop that occurs from running in Turbo will be trying lower capacity high drain cells that have less voltage sag.
The multimeter I have used on the video is this one here:
So, yes it actually has an Ohm scale but I never used it before.
I don't mean to disagree with you but I have already cleaned all contacts that are accessible to me. In terms of those springs there is nothing I can do about it. I already mentioned in my OP that the driver spring looks suspicious but I might be wrong and this black residue around the spring is just normal. It cannot be wiped off, though. However, I will try to follow up on your suggestions and report back here.
Meanwhile, Banggood's CS team has clearly stated that they will not consider this flashlight defective unless I can prove that the MR30 drops out of the turbo level above 3.9V. No word about the incapability of my MR30 using standard size 21700 batteries without PCB. They just ignore my request to give me an answer about it. They also stopped giving me suggestions to point me into the right direction, so this case can anyhow be resolved.
Bottom line:
- No help from ROFIS
- No help from Banggood
Last but not least:
I wanted to publish a negative but honest and factually stated review about the MR30 on Amazon DE. Guess what happened? Amazon now wrote me the review was rejected due to violation against their review criteria. I did actually check all criteria for violation but found none to be applicable to my review. Well, that figures...
That would be “write nothing that would discourage others from buying through Amazon”
or shorter, “Protect our profits”