Solarstorm T4 modded with a Luminus PT-54 Red LED.
The reason why I wanted a powerful red flashlight is because my 2 year old boy loves to go outside looking for animals at night. We tended to always make the deer walk away with white lights. The solution… Red! From deer, possum, armadillo, skunks and foxes, they stay right where they are. Even the deer on my front yard don’t seem bothered with us standing 30 yards away, but with the white light they always walked away. Success! :bigsmile:
I bought the light from Banggood, which took about 10-15 working days to arrive. At $29 it was a bargain!
The LED comes from eBay, bought it a couple of years ago. I think you can still get it from the same seller on eBay for $16. It is no longer in production.
The reflector is a smooth SST-50 reflector from Fasttech. Nice throw and plenty of spill. No complaints here.
I originally wanted to use the stock T4 driver, but ended up blowing it somehow. I am getting good at that… It did pull 13-14A with 3 IMR’s prior to blowing tantalum caps, so I decided to go with a regulated setup. Started with a SRK 7135 board, which was sanded down to 43mm OD and 7 extra chips were added for a total of 39 chips, 13.65A. The driver stays cool even with the low vf of 2.6v on high. LED current is right at 13.5A.
Next, after removing the stock pill (press fit), I placed the reflector in the light along with the bezel and lens and from the driver side I measured the depth the LED needed to be. From that I began to machine the new pill. I chose to have the reflector rest on the pill vs. the LED. I also wanted to maximize the surface area of the pill against the rest of the body in order to dissipate the 36W. After adding a 3/8” copper rod through the center of the pill, the final pill thickness is around 3/8”.
The thick copper PCB is case positive, so a thick enough layer of Arctic Silver Adhesive was used. I didn’t have to use Arctic Alumina. Also, 120w of soldering power is what it took to solder to the + contact.
I used a modified STAR mom as the firmware. Show of moon mode at PMW 1 (phase corrected) and 3 other evenly spaced levels. Credits to JohnyC and ToyKeeper.
The 2 trees between the 2 larger trees are 100 yards away. The iPad camera didn’t capture what I was seeing. I can see trees out to @ 350 yards at a different location. I will get some pics.
Here is the same spot with an Olight SR51, XM-L2 U2 1A dedomed running @ 6A max.
My son now only wants me to use the red light! 8)