Hi Jerry,
This is a question that Hank from this forum has been trying to explain to Banggood for a while now.
I don’t think I can explain it any better than him, and it is covered elsewhere in this forum.
Your best bet for a full understanding is to read through the few posts on this thread from Post #334:
Pictures to explain are located here:
My understanding is basically as follows:
The ‘Pill’ is the internal head section of the light that contains the driver board (usually +’ve battery terminal) with wires going up through the top of the pill to the PCB and LED.
- Therefore a ’Solid Pill’ is when the shelf that the LED/PCB sits on is a solid piece of metal. This allows a greater surface area to maintain direct contact with the LED/PCB (sometimes using a thermal-compound to assist), thereby allowing greater conductivity of heat for dissipation away from the head and out of the host body.
- Conversely a ’Hollow Pill’ (or “Hollow Pillow” if you’re DealMetic!) is when the shelf on which the LED and/or PCB sits, has a hole in the centre. In this case the PCB sits just on a narrow small lip/ledge around the outside edge only. If the PCB (to which the LED is soldered) is lifted slightly you can see through the hole and onto the rear of the driver board (back-side of the +’ve terminal).
- To further add complexity, sometimes the depth of the Solid metal ‘shelf’ is of different thicknesses. A 1mm thick solid section cannot disperse as much heat to the outside as say a 5mm thick shelf. This comes at the expense of weight.
- Similarly, the pills can be of different materials which are most commonly Aluminium, Copper, or Brass; each with different heat conductivity efficiencies. Apparently the Chinese language often confuses the words for Copper and Brass (G-d knows how they make their cables then?!!), leading to misrepresentation of Copper pills (better than Aluminium), with Brass.
I hope this is correct and helps explain; all my knowledge has come second hand from the much greater experts on this forum.
All the best,
Hirsh
P.S. If you understand this, perhaps you can also help explain it to Banggood!