Alright, initial disassembly and planning stages.
Overview shot:
The first thing I thought of was the cell carrier. It’s going to need a retrofit for high currents. The springs are suitable for, like, alkaline AA currents at best. I’m pretty sure I can cobble something together with Blue gen3 springs and 1mm copper sheet I’ve got. So I’m not super concerned about that problem immediately, because I believe I have everything I need on-hand already and it’s just a matter of putting in some hours and fiddling.
The next issue is gonna be the driver.
(Not much of a driver, huh?)
I want a new one, I want Anduril, but it’s mounted with two screw holes.
This is the main problem I have to figure out quickly, I think. If I need to order a driver from OSHPARK (or worse, aliexpress), I need to do it soon. I don’t think there’s an open-source driver design with appropriate screw holes in the layout… so I probably need to go with a small driver and rig some sort of adapter. My initial thought is a copper ring (possibly cut from my 1mm copper sheet?) with screw holes drilled into it, and soldered to the ground ring of the driver. (Edit: diameter between the screws is 30mm.) It looks like I’ve got about 5mm of depth to play with in the driver cavity, so the driver itself could potentially sit inside the cavity (with the adapter ring toward the tail end of the light… But I think I may want to do the opposite, for reasons I’ll discuss next:
The next issue is gonna be heatsinking. The shelf is, uh, not exactly the thickest shelf. And it has speed holes in it ;). It’s the shelf pictured above, under where the driver would be sitting. I haven’t opened the bezel so I haven’t measured the thickness, but I’m guessing 2mm, 3mm at most. I’m trying to think of ways to enhance this (possibly again featuring 1mm copper sheet) but I don’t remotely know how to attach any heatsinking I make to the bare aluminum shelf. The only saving grace here is that since I’m replacing the driver, I’ll be pulling all the wires out of the handle, and I can hopefully remove the entire pill to work on it.
Oh, there’s also the tail contact. It’s some sort of spring-loaded brass(maybe?) button, and I have no idea how it would handle any sort of high current. I haven’t tried super hard to disassemble it yet, but what I did try didn’t work.
Stretch goal: auxiliary LEDs in the switch button. (no pictures of that yet lol)
Super-double-stretch-goal: usb charging of some sort. (A man can dream)