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.
OMG finally, this has always driven me nuts!
- 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.
Great news…
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.
The problem I had was that it did not require leaving the regulated levels and it still shut down for a couple of seconds.
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.
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Thanks Matt