[Review] Wurkkos TS11 – the budget pocket thrower

LED Flashlights – General Info CR123A Flashlights
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You are looking for an inexpensive and small thrower for your pocket? With Anduril and fancy aux LEDs? Then try out the Wurkkos TS11!

I’ve got this flashlight for free from flashlightgo in return for a review. Thank you very much!

flashlightgo

This review is also available in German on my website: SammysHP Blog › Wurkkos TS11

Supplied parts and hardware

  • 18350 Li-ion battery with 1100 mAh (3.93 V at delivery, button-top)
  • USB-C charging cable
  • Lanyard
  • 2x replacement o-ring
  • Manual (EN, DE, CN)

The flashlight comes in the nice box with magnetic lid and a foam insert. The manual is just a quick start guide and doesn’t cover all details of Anduril. It’s better to refer to the official manual.

Length: 90 mm
Head diameter: 40 mm
Weight: 90 g + 22 g for the battery

In this review I’ll compare the TS11 with the Sofirn IF22A (same TIR optic and same LED) and the Noctigon KR1 with Osram CSLPM1.TG (W2) in a reflector.

The TS11 is available in black and orange. Of course I’ve chosen the orange variant! It has a simple design with some rings and without knurling.

Opposite to the switch is a USB-C charging port. The battery is charged with about 1 A so that charging takes around 2 hours. It’s rather high for the small battery, but still acceptable. During charging the LED in the switch lights up in red, after finishing it switches to green.

A silicone cover protects the USB port from water and dirt. It sits deep and flat, closes very easy, but won’t open by accident. From all the flashlights that I have with such a silicone cover, this is the best!

The tailcap has a hole to attach a lanyard. Unfortunately it is located in such a way that it prevents tailstanding when a lanyard is used. There would have been enough space to find a better place and maybe even fit a small magnet.

Without a lanyard the flashlight tends to roll away on a flat surface. The cutouts of the tailcap aren’t enough to stop it when it’s already moving. The TS11 doesn’t come with a clip and it’s also not designed to be used with one.

The battery tube is symmetric. That makes the little polarity indicator pretty useless. Just insert the battery with the positive side towards the head, as usual for most flashlights.

It has trapezoidal threads with a single o-ring on both sides. Springs on both sides allow for button and flat top 18350 batteries. On the driver you can see the three flashing pads to update the firmware.

Both the design and machining are simple, but well executed. It’s rated at IPX8 and should be able to survive submersion up to 2m and drops from a height of 1m.

The battery tube is compatible with the tube of the FC11 and FC12. This allows you to use the TS11 with 18650 batteries! You can get the FC11 tube for less than $3 directly at wurkkos.com.

User interface and features

The TS11 has a large silicone side switch. Surprisingly it works very good, is easy to find, is flat and feels good.

Located behind the switch and the TIR optic are RGB aux LEDs. Both switch together. Low level has the perfect brightness to be seen only in the dark, high level is very bright (but needs more power, of course).

The TS11 comes with Anduril 2 (version 2022-07-25 0715). Everyone here should already know what Anduril is, so I’ll skip this part of the review. If you don’t know it yet or need help, you should refer to the official manual.

It’s possible to update the firmware, which is explained very well in this guide.

Illumination

The TS11 uses a Luminus SFT-40, about 6000 K, low CRI, but a great LED for throwers due to its small and slightly rounded area. It’s the same LED used in the Sofirn IF22A.

It also uses the same TIR optic as the IF22A. So in theory they should produce more or less the same beam.

But there are still some differences. The spot of the TS11 is slightly smaller, but it spill more focused and a little brighter. On the other hand the KR1 creates a very even spill with a hard cutoff.

Sofirn IF22A | Noctigon KR1


Sofirn IF22A | Noctigon KR1

In practice the differences between the TS11 and IF22A are very small. Both have a very nice beam because the spot has a smooth transition to the spill, which slowly drops off.

Sofirn IF22A | Noctigon KR1

At short range you can clearly see some orange in the spill. It’s caused from the inside of the head which is also orange. So I’ve disassembled it and covered the inside with some self-adhesive aluminum tape.

This removes most of the orange spill. The remaining part comes from the outside of the bezel and can be removed with a black marker or a 3D printed insert.

Driver and runtime

The specifications say that the TS11 achieves 2000 lm with an intensity of 94750 cd (616 m).

Because all steps can be configured, I’ve limited my measurements to the lowest level (1/150) and turbo (150/150), immediately after turn on.

Mode Current
Turbo 6.34 A
Low 1.32 mA
Off 14 µA

6.34 A from this small battery is more than I expected! Even with a Keeppower IMR18350 with 1200 mAh it’s not much more.

For the same reason I did the runtime tests only for turbo. There you can see how the temperature regulation works. It’s pretty good and can use the full potential of the small host. While the battery discharges, the brightness slowly rises because the driver gets more efficient with lower voltage, so the temperature decreases.

At the end the brightness is limited by the voltage. It doesn’t turn off completely, because Anduril reduces the brightness when the voltage gets low and it will still run some time at the lowest level. When the voltage is below about 2.85 V the flashlight turns off.

The TS11 uses a simple FET+1 driver. 350 mA from a linear regulator, then direct-drive via a FET. Brightness is regulated via PWM, but Anduril makes sure that the frequency is so high that you can’t see it.

Power consumption by the aux LEDs is interesting. On the highest setting (white on high) it needs more than ten times the power of the regular main LED on its lowest level. This would drain the battery in just three days.

Color Low High
Red 154 µA 8.56 mA
Yellow 398 µA 11.16 mA
Green 170 µA 3.12 mA
Cyan 306 µA 8.16 mA
Blue 126 µA 5.46 mA
Magenta 260 µA 13.08 mA
White 440 µA 15.41 mA

Conclusion

The Wurkkos TS11 is a fantastic, small pocket thrower that can easily keep up with larger flashlights such as the Sofirn IF22A in terms of range and brightness. Anduril offers many functions and can be updated and extended with some experience. On the other hand, this complexity can easily be overwhelming. (Wurkkos has just released the TS11S, which is the same flashlight, but with a simper user interface.)

If you are bothered by the orange in the spill, you can either use the black version or apply my modification with the aluminum tape. Apart from that the TS11 is exactly what I expected.

Wurkkos TS11 at flashlightgo

13 Thanks
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When I first got a TS11, I thought it was basically a bigger Emisar D1, with less throw but built-in charging and RGB aux shining out the front.

Since then, my opinion of it has improved. The optic makes a particularly nice beam with a great emission pattern for a thrower. The LED throws better than I expected, significantly better than the old XP-L HI Emisar D1 it initially looked like. The onboard charging makes a lot of sense for this type of light, making the small battery more practical. And the unregulated DD FET driver doesn’t really reduce the usefulness for anything except drawing straight lines on a runtime graph.

It doesn’t throw as well as Hank’s D1/KR1 with W1 LED, but it gets a lot closer than I expected… and the extra size is a pretty fair tradeoff to get a convenient charger built in.

I had to add some extra firmware features to make the light work better though, since it has RGB aux in the button and the optic, linked together, and they’re quite bright. Like, it shows the voltage color after turning off, but the aux LEDs are so bright that I’d turn the light off and it would get brighter sometimes. So I added extra code to make it only do that when the main LED was at a brighter setting than the aux LEDs. Similar story for the real-time voltage colors it displays during use. At first, the aux LEDs would overpower the main LEDs, until I added a fix.

So I’d definitely recommend using a recent version of the firmware, like 2023-05-30 or later. The initial release wasn’t tuned for the hardware; it originally shipped with firmware for the TS25 (model 0715), but now there is a TS11 build (model 0717) which works better.

The main issue remaining is that the aux LEDs are bright enough to actually change the battery voltage a bit depending on what colors are active… so when the battery is at the boundary between two colors, it can sometimes oscillate back and forth. At least, when they’re in high mode. It doesn’t happen much in low mode.

Anyway, it’s definitely one of the best compact throwers right now. And of those top few, it has the lowest price.

4 Thanks
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I just flashed the 2023-5-30 to my TS11. The aux LEDs behave differently, is there somewhere I missed that explains how they work now? I like the battery check being on the aux rather than main. I don’t know If I like the little disco it does every time I turn it off before it goes back to the normal aux setting.

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Several things have changed lately. To better support lights with multiple sets of LEDs, I made a multi-channel branch and changed a lot of the foundational code for how stuff works internally.

Some of the user-visible changes are:

  • After turning off the light, the RGB aux LEDs show battery charge as a color, for a few seconds. It’s the same colors as the aux voltage mode, and it updates quickly during the first few seconds so you might see a sagging battery’s voltage recover. To turn this feature off or change the timing, use BattCheck → 7H, menu item 2, then click to tell it how many seconds the display should last. A value of 0 turns it off.
  • The TS11 and FC13 now show real-time battery voltage as a color during use, on the aux LEDs.
  • When a light has more than one channel mode enabled, “Ramp → 3C” and “Ramp → 3H” moved to 6C and 4H. These change the ramp shape (smooth/stepped) and do a momentary turbo. Instead, 3C is used to change the channel, and 3H is used to adjust the channel’s parameter (i.e. tint ramping).
  • RGB aux LEDs can be used as a “channel”, if enabled. Not very relevant on TS11 though. This feature is still somewhat experimental and likely to change.
  • Number blinky modes can use RGB aux LEDs instead of the main LEDs. To choose which channel it’s on, go to BattCheck and then do 3C to rotate through the available channel modes.
  • Version Check’s format changed from YYYYMMDDNNNN to NNNN-YYYY-MM-DD, to put the model number first.
  • There’s a new Tactical Mode on “Off → 6C”. It has 3 momentary modes on 1H/2H/3H, with each slot configurable. Defaults to high/low/strobe. 6C to exit.
  • Added a red+blue “police strobe”, on models with the ability to blink different colors.

The multi-channel branch is still experimental, but it’s getting closer and closer to a state where I can merge it back into its parent branch.

4 Thanks
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What is the approximate battery life with the aux in low mode ?

I know it varies by color so what is the best and worst-case scenario ?

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SammysHP put measurements in the review:

To get the runtime, divide the battery capacity by the power level. For example, a 1100 mAh 18350 cell running the low blue aux mode (126 uA) would be 1100 / 0.126 hours. Divide by 24 to get days. It works out to 363 days.

Meanwhile, high white aux mode (15.41 mA) would run for 1100 / 15.41 / 24 = 2.97 days.

These numbers are all approximate, of course. Battery capacity varies per cell, and aux power use varies with voltage. So the values are just ballpark estimates.

3 Thanks
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Thanks I didn’t notice that he wrote the measurements, my bad

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I thought there was a mode in aux 7H for smooth transition between color, but I can’t seem to find it now and the menu doesn’t say it has one. I only found the change in order but its like a sudden change not a transition. Am I imagining things?

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Probably yes. Anduril cannot fade between aux colors due to hardware limitations.

1 Thank
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And, no offense to you or your marvellous creations, but this is the reason I will be buying the TS11S. :wink:

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Thanks for the review. I checked all the places Amazon, the link you provided and I was able to get a steal on the Wurkkos website… under $28 for the light and the extension tube!

Thanks

Screenshot_20231011_134709_Samsung Internet
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The same order would have cost $59 on Amazon, more than twice of what I paid.

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Protected 18350 cell from Skilhunt H04miniRC does not fit to TS11 :neutral_face:

1 Thank