Hmm, that’s unfortunate. Sounds like Sofirn probably made a bunch of hat clips for the SC21 and needs to get rid of them before considering any new designs.
The first two are typically referred to as a moon mode. It illuminates things to roughly the same brightness that the moon does.
The last one is usually handled on other lights by adding a button LED or aux LEDs. These stay on whenever the main LEDs are off, so the light will be easy to find in the dark. They also frequently indicate how much battery charge remains.
In terms of numbers, the boundaries are fuzzy, but in approximate terms, the low output levels are:
- 1 to 10 lm: low mode
- 0.1 to 1 lm: moon mode (usually below 0.5)
- 0.01 to 0.1 lm: firefly mode
Moon modes are useful for seeing the ground in front of you without waking anyone or compromising night vision. Firefly modes are typically too low for that, but are still useful for locating the light.
The button / aux LEDs are generally in the range of 0.01 to 0.1 lm, while the main LEDs on most Anduril lights typically go down to about 0.2 lm. So the entire range is usually covered. But this light has nowhere to put aux LEDs, and it sounds like it might not have a button LED either.
I was bothered by the poor low modes on his linear drivers too… so I finally fixed it. At least, as much as the hardware allows. This involved a few different changes:
- Dramatically increased the resolution of the low end of the ramp, as documented here.
- Re-calculated the ramp so the bottom end is smoother and has more steps from moon to low. Now instead of 3/150 being that too-bright mode, it has moved up to like… 12/150 or so. There are more levels below it.
- Compensated for the power regulator’s slow activation at moon mode. There is a new “jump start” feature which makes the LED turn on faster, but it requires some manual calibration to get the amount right.
- Added a new “don’t ramp after moon” option to make it easier to hit moon level from off. That way, the user can just hold the button and it’ll turn on at moon. If they want to ramp up more, they have to release the button and press again.
- Added an option to slow down the smooth ramp, for people who don’t like the default fast speed.
On all five of my linear-driver lights, the lowest mode is just as low as the original D4v2, or in some cases even lower… and the bottom end of the ramp is lower and smoother. Plus, it still has the aux LEDs if you want something even lower or a different color.
However, the power regulator is still somewhat sensitive at the bottom few levels, so if you go directly from turbo to moon, it’ll usually turn off for a second or two before it turns on and stabilizes. This is kind of a silly corner case though, because if you go from turbo to moon, you probably won’t be able to see anyway.
Also, the default floor is still set relatively high, because Hank wanted it to be high enough to avoid the turbo-to-moon issue. But this can be lowered by the user.
This is all brand new though, so it may require flashing new firmware yourself. I uploaded new builds yesterday, and am still adding and improving things.
After these changes, I finally got the linear drivers to work as well for low modes as the older FET+1 style… and in some cases, even better than the old ones. But it takes a bit of tweaking for each light to get the settings just right.