I’ve been improving Anduril’s options for low-light and low-power modes, like here for example… but I don’t know what will be feasible to do on this particular light.
If it can be done without sacrificing anything important, it probably will be. But I don’t know yet if it can… and I’m not deeply involved in this project, so it’s not up to me.
About the RRT-01 though, someone was asking me what the fuss is about, so I tried to explain it to them… and they didn’t really “get” it, so I took some pictures.
jon_slider knows all about this, but for everyone else…
The RRT-01 is a very unusual light, because it can go ridiculously low. I mean, if you think it’s dark outside at night, that’s nothing. If you think it’s dark in the middle of nowhere during a new moon, that’s still not dark enough to compare. It can go so low it’s literally below the ability of a human eye to see it.
Here is a picture showing a tritium vial next to a RRT-01. The tritium vial is 1mm wide, and about 6 years old, so it’s nowhere near as bright as it was when it was new. The RRT-01 is on, and making light:
Wait, you can’t see it? How about we crank up the image gamma. Here’s how it looks after some post-processing. The surface of the LED is darker than the reflection of the tritium vial… approximately the same brightness as the camera’s noise floor:
And that isn’t even the RRT-01’s lowest setting. It’s just the lowest level the camera could pick up.
To make it easier to see, I took another picture. This time, the RRT-01 has been turned up several levels, and I allowed some outside light into the room.
It’s still well below 0.01 lumens in this photo.
Runtime in this mode is about 1.5 days. I measured the power usage of the lowest visible level at 19.1 mA. It is frequently mistaken for being off at these low levels though, so it’s prone to emptying its battery without anyone ever knowing it was on. It’s easy to turn on by accident, so when I’ve carried mine, I ended up compulsively double-checking it to make sure it’s off.