Sofirn Q8 Plus

True, well appreciate it.

Btw what do you consider a low-Vf LED? Would a 519a be low-Vf? Or you mean low low?

I do seem to be doing more damage than good with the stuff I’ve tried so far lol. I am not well equipped for working on stuff this tiny and precise. Like, ya I can probably use this giant cast iron bench vise covered in motor oil to hold the pcb in place if I wipe it down a bit and put some foam in between it lol

LMAO

Yeah I can’t find any that will run lower moonlight anymore, at least without trying to slow the PWM or something. And the new ones just pop with 2S input. I have an old one “tanking it like a champ” in a 2S L6 driver

The 519A is pretty low forward Voltage. The big SFH55 too, these take huge amp loads but not sure it’s worth all the effort.

Just have to monitor what the specs are on a given emitter and try to be sure your setup isn’t going to run away and spike it out. Djozz’s tests show me what to expect as far as optimizing goes, always good to see it from other’s testing too. Average it out and plan accordingly. Not Always a great idea to use bigger leads, hotter cells. :wink:

Such great information. TK and Dale, sure is good to see you both posting again and sharing your knowledge!

TK…didn’t you have a thread back in the day that explained PWM in detail? The hardware side, not visual. Seems like a lot of people today are associating PWM with “bad” and of course that isn’t true and many don’t really understand what it is, how it’s used, or why…and I don’t understand it fully myself in order to help explain it adequately. I searched here a bit and read through some stuff from Wight and Dr. Jones and a few others but wasn’t seeing what I think I remember seeing. :slight_smile: It would be great to have a bookmarked reference thread like that to share as needed.

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Thanks Correllux, I mean, I appreciate the thought and all but ToyKeeper is the one with infinite knowledge.

I’ve said it all along, I’m just hacking stuff together and hoping nothing explodes! :grin:

I don’t think I had any threads like that… all that comes to mind is the one I linked a couple posts ago:

This thread doesn’t really explain what PWM is… just one method for how to increase the resolution.

Ok…I may just be remembering indivudual posts and conflating users to boot. I do remember that awesome dynamic PWM thread - that was the start of great and greater things to come!

Idk if youve bought any power tools lately but everything uses brushless motors now. That’s like the thing to be. It’s all brushless. If it’s not brushless it’s trash. And brushless motors are controlled with PWM. Basically the same thing. I think.

So say if you were a marketing guy and you were tasked with improving the way flashlights with PWM are perceived you might think about calling them brushless flashlights or something. Flashlights with brushless dimming. You just gotta work the word brushless in there somewhere and it’ll sell. And give it 740lb/ft of torque too

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At some level, basically everything digital is based on PWM… just sending square waves through electrical circuits, 1s and 0s, on and off. The important part is the details, what they do with it and how.

Most of the good stuff keeps the digital parts inside, and converts to/from analog when interfacing with the user. Typically this means turning something on and off fast enough to produce something in-between when it goes through an analog component to smooth out the signal.

For PWM style flashlights, that analog component is your eye. And … that’s not a bad thing. It works pretty well, as long as it’s done in a way which doesn’t register on maukka’s “snob index” meter. It mostly just needs a reasonably high frequency.

The “PWM is bad” thing comes from poor implementations, where the digital part is visibly digital… where the pulses are slower than the response time of an eye. It’s like the flashlight equivalent of a low-res pixelated image. It doesn’t mean all digital images are bad… just that that particular picture is. Instead of looking like the thing it represents, it just looks like a bunch of colored squares.

OTOH, it isn’t just digital systems which do this.

What people are seeing and disliking is quantization. The thing is, everything is quantized. It’s just not usually visible. At least, not without specialized equipment. Look deep enough though, zoom in far enough, and eventually you’ll see the pixels (so to speak). It seems that nothing is truly analog.

That’s one of the biggest and most fascinating discoveries of the past century or so – that everything in the universe seems to be quantized … or rather, quantum. Look close enough, and everything is digital … in a sense. Maybe not strict 1s and 0s, but at least discrete – distinct states which apparently can’t be smoothed between.

Like, make an electron go from its 4th to 3rd energy state, and it emits a single indivisible unit of energy, a photon, like a “bit” in a computer transmitting a single “1” in a sea of zeroes. It’s the universe’s smallest, highest-resolution PWM. When that bit hits something, like a particle in your eye, it briefly raises the energy state of that particle, from perhaps the 4th to the 5th level, and triggers a complex response which eventually is perceived as vision.

Do this more, and the perceived brightness goes up. But it’s not smooth, in a strict sense of the word… much like how a beach isn’t technically soft. The beach is made of many hard, sharp, tiny grains of sand… and only feels soft in aggregate. The same applies to lights, where brightness may feel smooth or steady, but only because the individual pieces are too small and too fast to perceive.

Bad PWM is like a beach made out of big, sharp rocks. It doesn’t feel soft because the pieces are too big. It’s otherwise not really all that different than a soft beach though… it just doesn’t have high enough resolution to feel good.

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@ToyKeeper … Thank you for that explanation, it put it all in perspective for me!!

I think I know Someone who is quantized, they lack the resolve to feel good.

*yawn* Sorry, I was just rambling between naps, kinda sleepwalking on the keyboard… which apparently gets me even more verbose than usual.

Ah, no… sorry. That wasn’t aimed at you. Someone I know that had an injury a couple of years ago, has been on the meds far too long. Gaining weight, losing the ability to care about much. Becoming the rocky shore as compared to the soft beach, as it were.

I thought it was a great post actually. Thought provoking with useful analogies. Keep those naps coming… :grinning:

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I didn’t think they were still giving out opioids long term anywhere anymore. But maybe they are in some places idk.

That whole post I was thinking this should be like the opening monologue to a movie where idk like Matt Damon plays like a professor who teaches an advanced PWM course at MIT and he really likes PWM, always talking about PWM. But then there’s like this other Prof in the department and she likes Matt Damon and Matt Damon likes her cuz she hot but in a lab coat science kinda way like the woman doctor in the first dr. Strange movie. but she thinks he wastes too much time in the lab on his PWM experiments and he’ll never have time for her.

But then one night Matt Damon PW’s too hard in the lab goes into the PWM realm. Emily finds the portal and goes in after him. Cut to black. Open on Matt Damon’s hand reaching out the portal in the middle of a dark desert. He crawls out the portal, in a different part of the world. He’s barely makes it out alive. Then he looks around and realizes… this isn’t a desert. This was my lab! Looks, there’s my picture of Emily I always hid in my drawer. He brushes the dust of the nuclear fallout from the picture and looks around. This is no desert. This was the university. Where is everybody? 200 years have gone by and the world is over. Now Matt Damon has to PWM back through time, save Emily, stop whatever it was that ended the world, get back to his time period, and most of all tell Emily that he will make time for her! He promises. By using PWM…

Coming to theatres this summer

Talk about rambling… :smiling_imp:

This is my masterpiece

Emily is dead when he goes back, Karen…

Even think of putting xhp50.3’s in here? Or not worth the effort? Did you end up putting sft40s in the sp36?

I’m thinking of taking all my sofirn stuff with sst40s and green lh351ds and replacing them all with sft40’s and 519a’s across the board.

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I just ordered the Q8 Sofirn EC06, and 3 Molicell 45 amp P42A’s, and am very confused about what upgrades I should do to the flashlight to improve its performance. There are many different upgrades on the forum, so I am just a little confused about which are the most important for the flashlight. Thank you for creating this form, it is extremely helpful, and I am hoping that you will consider my response.
Thank you,
Alex K.