IT’S ALIVE!
It’s ridiculously powerful, I can bounce it off walls and turn off televisions in other rooms without a direct shot at the TV set. Completely blows away the previous flashlight design in power.
Nice, are you planning to sell driver and LEDs?
I have a spare p60 host with a nice/crappy plastic lens layin around…
Cool!
That’s the plan. I’ll sell P60 modules, or a mounted LED + modified driver combo.
Gonna say 25 bucks USD for a LED and driver pair. This is calculated from:
- LED is ~$10, ATTiny85V and resonator are $3 from Digikey. Plus 15% tax = $15
- LED PCBs cost me $1/pop
- Driver (8*7135 Nanjg 105C) is 3 bucks at fasttech
- total = $19
And there’s about half an hour’s work - taking off the SOIC, J-leading the wider Tiny85V and soldering it on, soldering down the resonator, programming the uC, and reflowing the oslon with hot air. Say $6 for labor, I figure $25 is reasonable.
A P60 is $2 at fasttech and I’ll add $3 for labor and materials, so I’ll say $30 for a P60.
I would like to buy one.
I am not sure if your led PCB is optimal as it is non standard, perhaps a sinkpad with a layer of kapton underneath would be better…or a PCB with vias under the thermal pad like it is recommended from cree
Another point which is interesting would be if you could program an additional mode constant high in it, so we could use it as a ir light. I have seen a video on YouTube which clearly shows how good it works with a night vision/camcorder.
Awesome Black Oslon! 
Connect all 5 as slaves to one! Just as a little test.
I’ll let you know when my tv turns off. 
A high mode (no tvbgone) would certainly increase it usefulness.
Small LED shops like illum.supply, intl-outdoor etc don’t have them but you know bigger suppliers have 20mm stars at least, right? Much better heatsinking with mcpcb. Perhaps use a host that takes 20?
I know there is a something fun about dropins but the contact with the host is poor. It can be improved.
Osram oslon mcpcb mouser led-mounting-bases.com
Non-stock at digikey, you could try a request but they likely wouldn’t get it in just for a few. They say manufacturer provides it in packs of 500.
I can direct you to free samples even.
I know there’s 20mm PCBs available from a few spots, unfortunately every light I own takes a 16mm PCB. Some of the night vision guys have been mounting these LEDs on XP-G boards, but it’s a fairly tight fit.
I would LOVE for DX, Fasttech, KD etc. to sell a SFH4725S on a 16mm PCB. led-tech.de sells an 850nm SFH4715S black oslon on a 16mm star, I wonder if they’ll do a group buy with the 940nm LED if enough of us are interested. 940nm works quite a bit better for consumer IR.
On thermals… the LED’s stated ratings are 5A for 500uS, 1A continuous current, and 3.4W continuous power. The driver runs the LED at 2.8A, and I’m measuring a forward voltage of 3.2V across the LED when it’s on - so “100% on power” is 9W. The LED is modulated to the IR carrier at 50% duty cycle giving 4.5W “on power” into the LED, and the worst case code format (Sony SIRC) is 60% duty on top of this, so power dumped in the LED during a SIRC transmission is 2.7W. But other codes (JVC, Sharp, etc) are much friendlier, with duty cycles of 20-33%. Also, codes only average about 100ms in length, and there’s a 250ms delay from one code to the next so the overall average power dissipated in the LED during operation. Taking all that into account, we’re sub 1W. I’ll make a dumb script that can run through the codes/delays and calculate this number exactly.
Overall I’m confident we’re fine with the FR4 board, with 2.8A drive. If I get a good MCPCB, I’m hoping I can crank that up to 4A or more J)
Also, I’ll sell a bare modded driver for $12 for those who want to mount their own LED.
I’ll clean the AVR software up at some point and release it open source (CC BY-NC-SA license), for those who want to tweak the driver code, add “IR flashlight” modes, etc… or build their own drivers from scratch. The AVR software uses my own code, but uses the raw IR codes from the TV-B-Gone project which is CC BY-SA licensed.
One after the other.
They’re arranged in order from most common (Sony, LG, etc) to least common. It takes close to a minute to bang out the full set of codes, but in my experience most TVs turn off after 5-10 seconds tops.
3 more PCBs built:
I’ve got one of them mounted to a small aluminum plate, being driven with a constant 1A. Top surface of the PCB is probably in the 40-50C range, uncomfortably hot but not “burn you” hot. Going by the 11deg/W junction to case number, 3.4W of drive power and 145C maximum junction temperature, I’d say the PCB’s working fine.
Building drivers tomorrow. If you want a LED/driver pair or a P60, fire me a PM. 3 available.
Update:
Got 3 more drivers built, but my cheap eBay SOIC clip is busted. I’m gonna solder wire straight to the IC leads to accomplish programming in the short term, and buy a proper 3M clip eventually.
Sending these out will be held up by a day.
The first thing to do with those Ebay SOIC clips, before you even use them, is to take it apart (push out the hinge pin) and glue the lower pins in place. I use superglue.
Those clips are made with the pins in two pieces. If you don’t glue the lower half of the pins down, they will ride up into the clip. If you try to push them back down, it bends the upper part of the pin and it will no longer make contact.
Discovered that, I’ve now got a dab of epoxy holding the fingers in place.
Problem with my clip is that the little ‘fingers’ that grab underneath the chip and keep the clip in place have worn down, causing the clip to slip off the chip with the slightest movement. Doesn’t help that I’m clipping onto a wide SOIC, and I suspect this clip was intended for narrow SOICs.
For this use you can even use a breakout board to program the controllers as you are soldering them in anyway…
I use a board from DX on which I have soldered an ISP female socket, it accepts the wider type of soic8 as well…
Just hold them with slight pressure in place with one finger while you burn the firmware in them. Afterwards you can solder them on the driver…
Bad luck with soic clips seems very common…I gave up on them
Yes, those clips are pretty useless for the wide SOICs. I used to try holding the clip in place with one hand, but that doesn’t work very well. I now use a cable with a bunch of HP logic analyzer SMT pin grabbers on it.
I think that this may also do a good job… looks like it is for wide SOICs…
Not a bad idea, unfortunately I need an oscillator attached to a couple of pins in order to burn/verify the fuses, since I’m using a ceramic oscillator.
I wish SOIC test sockets weren’t so expensive, I’d build a board specifically for programming these.
Keeping those pins in place during programming looks painful.
I’ve got a logic analyzer at work with pin grabbers, good idea… I’ll give that a shot.
Actually they are quite cheap. Search Ebay for “SOIC socket”.
I have some of these and they work quite well. I made a PC board that converts the 8-pin AVR pinouts (it also can take a 28 pin DIP ZIF socket for TINY 13/85, etc and MEGA328 and TINY2313’s). the 10 pin ISP header so no special cable was needed (I hate soldering cables).
The .150” wide ones are less than $3. I bought 5 for like $10.
THANK YOU! Just bought 2 of each. I can hack a resonator onto one and plug it straight into the prototyping area on my AVR Dragon for programming.
Won’t be here in time to finish the current batch of TVBG drivers unfortunately. Never got a chance to program them today, too busy at work.
Two drivers programmed now - I ended up soldering bits of resistor lead to the pins, and clipping onto them with logic analyzer clips - I J-leaded the leads fairly tight to the package so I couldn’t clip onto them directly.
I programmed the oscillator fuses on a 3rd one and it dropped dead, I’ve probably got the resonator installed wrong, gonna go debug that now.
I wish the Tiny85 came in a narrow SOIC…
After a lot of this…
We have this!
Didn’t bring a P60 host into work with me today, I’ll test the P60s tonight and if all goes well, they’ll be in the mail tomorrow to the two texans. Werner, I’ll mail out your PCB+LED and bill you with whatever it costs to ship.