Interesting... For the 2S setup I'm look'n to do, I'll keep the 7135's in.
My freak'n order of 20 XHP-50's with Cutter is in shambles -- I'm not happy with Mark Riley there - very poor responsiveness, poor mgt of inventory, seem to care less to tell you what you ordered as "in stock quantities" doesn't exist, for some reason...
Yeah, kinda like the XHP35 GB awhile back. During that I was trying to buy a few other items as well, I ended up giving up as he would not get in contact with me to take my money. lol.
I'm a dumb you-know-what! Why didn't I order these boards yet? Think I noted this all before on Oct 2nd in this thread, then I promptly forgot bout it.
Ok, ordering them now.... 
Reminder for myself, post #390: https://budgetlightforum.com/t/-/41018/390
Great, curious to see how the LDO works for you, never used one myself so the component values are obviously just an educated guess. 2x of the 10uF caps in both C1 and C2 should work though.
I keep getting requests to sell these drivers (which is great, it lets me gauge market interest to know if it is worth risking an investment in a larger scale production run of these). I really would like to sell these but I have high standards and making these by hand takes a lot of time.
Does anyone know of a good / cheap place to get PCB’s like this assembled?
Hhmm. Thought someone mentioned where Richard gets his done. I don't deal with the places myself, but guys I directly work with and sit 10 feet from, do. The assembly houses we use, dunno. Our stuff is bigger, much more complicated, so of course the costs are fairly high, and we supply them with some test fixture to test the assembled boards, engineered solely for functional testing, so there's a lot more involved.
Many times, assembly/PCB houses are specialized - some for complex stuff, some for low or high volumes, some for mil/medical/commercial, etc... Takes a bit of research to hook up with the proper place for the volume/pricing. We've found the hard way, a lot of houses won't turn work down they are not good at doing - you find this out later.... It's a joy, lots of fun, and entertaining 
. I know just enough to get myself in trouble about this biz.
I’m not sure where he gets his PCB’s now, but I believe he bought is own pick and place machine and I know he has a fancy reflow oven.
Ohhh - maybe I was confusing the bare board PCB house, no assembly.
Yeah, I have found a few places that do small run PCB assembly, the prices were just a bit too high to make it reasonable unless a very large quantity were purchased though. Didn’t know if anyone knew of a place that specialized in stuff like ours for good prices.
Hmm, I need to look into “panelizing” the drivers, see if that makes things any better. A lot of the places I looked at made boards the same price all the way up to 50mmx50mm. You could fit four 17mm drivers in that footprint……
At work, we try to do lean manufacturing, just-in-time, etc., but that means small quantities, or stocking by our suppliers - the board houses aren't too keen with that idea. We do at most 50 pieces/month for assembled boards, mostly less than that - it gets pricey.
Don't think you'll find what you want. Setup and overhead per job gets real costly for small runs with them. Also if they are supplying the parts, same deal - small qty buying for them gets costly, as it is for us. Probably this is why Richard is doing his own thing.
Got some stuff in:
These are the 15 mms, compact version, and thin, on the left, sanded down:
For the On the Road M3:
Driver stripped. Already had a NW LED on DTP copper in it:
Don't think I can fit it flat, but should fit this way, angled. Even with the 7135's populated, I'm think'n I'd have enough room, and can manage the wiring and ground. Where the old MCU was, pins #2 and #3 are the switch and switch LED, so looks good to wire them up:
I found one place in china that has a reasonable price per driver for the assembly and PCB, although not sure on parts cost. The issue is I have to buy 200 (could get 100 but the price per driver goes down a lot for 200) of them to get the price down and needless to say that is not a cheap up front investment.
In that kind of bulk looks like they could be sold for around $15 each although the numbers are very primitive. Just not sure it is worth jumping into that kind of investment at this point.
I have considered making up batches of them by hand when I have time and posting them in a “get them while you can” style thread but I have never been a big fan of that kind of sales venue. People can’t get them when they need them ect.
Also a few other options I am considering, just not sure yet. Doesn’t really matter yet though, I won’t officially sell them till the firmware is complete anyways.
Speaking of firmware, is there a link for Narsil that I should/could put in the OP, that will be updated as narsil is updated?
I need to order a DO1 board so I can actually try narsil, only light I have that has an e-switch and is worth modding. Well I guess I could go crazy with the L6 as well…
Those look good, I just noticed I forgot or it left the R3 out of the silk screen. Opps.
The thin boards copper looks more “coppery”, at least in the picture.
I am interested to see how they work out.
You also reminded me to get my butt in order and order some L6 drivers as well, along with some D01 drivers. When did you order yours? I am thinking about ordering from one of the china houses just to test them out and kinda curious to compare production times / quality.
Oh, I have the Narsil-triple posted on my google drive share. Still the latest, but I'll need to be working on the 15 mm support, so need to get the LEd working on pin #7, and the battery monitoring working off od the internal reference.
Standard Narsil v1.2 here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1IxYZuk4DjcT09aME82VzQ3T2c
This folder has a bunch of things, but with NarsilTriple included, the latest current version is v1.2, file: NarsilTriple v1-2.zip, and the triple AVRDude download cmd: 85Narsil3.bat (must edit the path according to your local development), and 85fuses.bat sets the fuses for Narsil:
Also in the same folder is the latest v1.1 manual for Narsil - it still applies for v1.2. It's in both Word doc and PDF formats.
ohh - just ordered the L6 boards 2 days ago -- totally forgot bout them. Didn't order the D01's figure I'll piggyback a smaller one in, cheaper, plus I'll have extra smaller boards.
Thanks, updated the OP with the info. I tend to forget about things I don’t personally use lol.
Thats a good idea to piggy back in a driver in the D01, there is plenty of room for it. Not sure what I will do, depends on the cost.
While your working on the internal battery reference if you want to prep it to be injected into the bistro code (preferably as a definable option) that would be great. Besides the updates I am waiting on from TK thats the only other major things I need to get a final version released to make these as standardized as possible.
I just hope I can get all the mods into Narsil, and tested, in a realistic time. Not sure we talked or you are aware, but DEL wrote a full blown driver with temperature monitoring based on real temperature, and the internal battery ref for batt monitoring. So, I just plan on borrowing (stealing) his code, but of course there's some issues to address - he uses interrupts which I don't think I'll be doing... But he does have a full table of voltage levels, from what I recall, calibrated already, so that should be a huge help.
Nope, I had no idea. I knew he wrote some code for the internal reference but like I said before, I can read code just good enough to know when to nod while talking about it. Actually using it or injecting it into bistro is well over my head at this point although I keep telling myself I need to sit down and actually learn C or C, too many times through the years it would have come in handy.
I am proud of myself for successfully (and on my first try) making new strobe modes that actually worked. lol
It is no rush or big deal, take your time. Same reason I am not pestering TK except once every few weeks. I know these are spare time projects, been there, doing that myself. I just know how projects like this can easily be forgotten and left to rot just before being completed and I don’t want to let that happen here. I get easily distracted by new projects and once I move onto another project I don’t tend to revisit old ones for some time.
Well unless you order in bulk the china places are actually not that much cheaper due to having to pay shipping costs. So unless a bunch of people want L6 / D01 / multi-cell SRK drivers I guess I will just go with oshpark. Once you start ordering in multiples of 20+ then china starts getting a lot cheaper, real quick.
Made some progress on the 15 mm triple in the On The Road M3. Could only fit 3 1735's in the bank - the ground tab pad from one was totally removed from the sanding down of the edge.
I replaced the stock RED and low value resistor (47 ohms) with a warm white LED and 6.8K ohm resistor
I bench tested this assembly and all working so far. The warm white LED works on pin #7 of the MCU with the full triple channel support working with ramping. Didn't work on/add the voltage monitoring off the internal reference yet, but think'n I should before final assembly. Also gotta tweak the fixed mode sets to work with this ramping table - the table is tweaked for just 3 7135's, as opposed to for 8 I add before. I left both tables in with compile switches to choose.
The driver mounting is pretty hairy with this one. I used old style resistor lead wire to bridge ground between the stock driver and the TA driver, plus a solder point on the front edge to the brass bass.
Turned out that backside pad for pin #7 you added came in real handy. The GREEN wire is the switch, while there's a small white wire for the SMD LED, conected to the pad under the driver.
Making me wish I'd ordered 85's. Nice work. Oh, can't you stack one more 7135 on top of the one by the attiny?