Thanks for putting some thought into a clicky RGBW driver even though you hate clicky UI’s. :partying_face:
Beautiful mod!
Most I like this extra boards for the color LEDs.
Which intl-outdoor RGB driver are you talking about? I couldn’t find any.
Ai, they finally have run out of them, it was in stock for years. Mountain electronics sells them too, and I see only 2 listed, so that is almost finished too: Color and Dynamic White XM-L Driver - 17mm
I started a thread about this driver two years ago, but that is not very relevant anymore if the driver is not for sale anymore 
, pity, it was an interesting driver, nothing like it around. djozz driver hack #2. (was: Colour driver build, based on D882 sot89 transistor?)
All of my led boards are shared and available to order:
XM-L
XP-L
XB-H
Wow that’s one amazing flashlight
All those wires though, looks like a snakes wedding 
Are you planning to make drivers or even mcu’ available soon? Any idea in a time frame?
Yes, I’ll have drivers available in about 12 days in 16mm (double stack), 19mm, and 24mm (trimmable). I plan to make an info thread about it once I have them in hand. I can also make programmed microcontrollers available immediately in the qfn package, though I didn’t expect much interest in those.
So, I’ve been delayed by Real Life™, but I’m still planning on a 4-color driver and firmware. Not sure how useful it’ll be for flashlight purposes though, since the driver is large and the UI focuses primarily on automatic color-changing modes.
Well, it would be cool to have it available, so if somebody wishes to design their own driver board based on your microcontroller, we’d have that option. Of course, we’d need you to tell us how to ‘wire’ the chip into a circuit so that everything works as you designed it to.
ToyKeeper, it’s good to have you back from Real Life. I’m still interested in following your progress on that driver, even if it doesn’t result in something I can use personally.
Any update on the availability of your driver? I get the first one 
I got shipment notification for the first set (19mm) so I will have them very soon! I’ll start an info thread when I have them in hand. I’m working on a clicky version of the firmware but it looks like that may take a while to get working.
[quote=tterev3 I’m working on a clicky version of the firmware but it looks like that may take a while to get working.[/quote]
Thanks for starting on that
Aaahh. Clickies are for beginners. JUST KIDDING! Just a joke
By far the most common driver size people use here is 17mm. Hard to fit much onto that though. A screen would definitely not fit in such a host. It sounds like modders may be more interested in easy RGBW though, and less interested in doing the intricate work involved in this totally amazing build.
BTW, what frequency does the dimming PWM run at? The last MELD I measured was ~500 Hz, but that was quite a while ago. People seem happy with anything from about 15 to 30 kHz, fast enough to not be visible or audible but otherwise as slow as possible.
Also, how does that 8192:1 dimming resolution work out in practice? I mean, what are the highest and lowest levels in lumens, and how much stairstep effect is there at the low end? On PWM-based drivers the perceptual brightness ramp usually seems to look something like this:
I usually find that extra resolution helps a lot at the low end but is irrelevant up higher. This is one of the reasons behind the FET+1 or FET+N+1 driver designs. For example, the BLF Q8 gets a range of about 0.25 lm up to 5000 lm, which I guess could be called a 20,000:1 ratio. It’s technically only 7 bits of resolution (128-step ramp), but it manages to give extremely smooth ramping all the way since most of that ramp is focused at the low end in a shape like x**3.
Sweet.
It may be worth mentioning other relvant LED boards, a quad XQ-E and triple XP-E2. The lightsaber crowd is into triples and quads with tightly-packed emitters for optimizing throw and brightness on multicolor lights, so places like Saberforge and TheCustomSaberShop have a bunch of 20mm MCPCBs available in a variety of configurations. It’s pretty straightforward to do RGBW or RGB or white and two colors or go color-only with RGBA. These need a limit of about 1A or 1.5A per emitter though, which adds up to a lot of 7135 chips or some big awkward inline resistors per color.
My condolences. That sounds frustrating.
I’m still undecided about whether I’ll use a clicky only or clicky plus e-switch. Depends on what parts I can find and where they can physically fit. What I’m doing is easier though.
Good to know, I’ll work on a 17mm version. I have a 16mm that’s double stacked, so I know I can fit that. I’ll see if it’s possible to do a single board at 17 though.
This version has the white running at 1kHz. It’s just barely perceptible if you swing the light around quickly while looking into it, but not noticeable in real use. I can bump it up to 2kHz and give up a bit of dimming resolution, but this speed seemed like the best compromise to me. The colors run at 2kHz.
I haven’t used a driver like you mentioned so I don’t have a comparison, but in my testing of this new firmware, to me the 13bit resolution makes an enormous difference, even at higher levels. I’m currently running a 256-level ramp with 13bit outputs that are on a true logarithmic dimming curve. The only steps you can see are in the lowest 3 or 4 levels. I’ll see how well it comes across in a video when I make a post about the new drivers. I also plan to test out a 512-level ramp with the same 13bit resolution to see if that gives any noticeable improvement, but I doubt it will. The first set of drivers are 1.4A on the white channel, so you get about 0.12mA on the lowest level. I don’t have lumen values, but the low end is so low you can’t tell if it’s on in the daylight. I actually may need to bump it up higher since it may not even be useful to go that low.
I have a preliminary version of the clicky UI done, it came out pretty good I think. I plan to put up a video in the next couple days to get some feedback on it before I start sending out drivers.
Edit: demo here MELD-C UI demo
Speechless. I’ve never seen worms magnified like that before on a driver. Hope you washed your hands well.
Seriously though, that really is something out of this world. I take my hat off to you. Those wires and your soldering, program abilities and modding skills can only be carried out by a very few. Nice work.
Simply amazing!
RMM generally carries drivers in 17mm, 20mm, and 22mm. 14mm and 15mm are nice for AA/14500 lights, but that’s probably way too small to fit the parts. And 46mm drivers are handy for soup can lights. But 17mm shows up the most often.
Rey recently made a light with 2 kHz PWM, and people got a little upset because of the visible pulsing. Someone even made a poll about it. He ended up making a new driver with 9 kHz pulses, though that’s toward the low end of what people generally like around BLF because it’s still within audible range.
It’s hard to go too low around here. Personally I like my moon mode in the range of 0.2 lm to 0.4 lm, but it’s rare to hear complaints even down at 0.03 lm. It doesn’t really matter if it’s hard to see in daylight; it’s all about how it looks with fully night-adjusted vision… like when waking up halfway through the night.
People even seem to like the super-low L2c firefly mode on Zebralights, which is less than 0.01 lm.
So, I wouldn’t bother raising the floor unless it actually fails to light up at all on a nearly-empty cell. The lowest level varies with emitter though (and some other factors), so another good method is to do what Tom E did and make the moon level user-configurable.
Could you add wifi so you can turn if off from your phone from anywhere in the world? Lol
Incredible work btw