Bwahahaha Exactly. Thankfully, most of my friends don’t own firearms. Oh well. at the end of the day, they are my friends though. I made them myself.
I’m much calmer these days, not like when I would carry spare optical mice, to replace the lumpy, grotty ball mice that they expected me to use to make their computer work again, and which I would unplug, put into a plastic bag and stomp.
I’ve mellowed I guess.
I see you’ve met my father.
Does anybody here know where i can get a new switch for my d4 at? I have emailed Hank 2 times and gotten no response.
I just got 2 from Mtn, delivered Saturday. The Nichia and S4 2B. Both are awesome but I like the warmer Nichia. I’ve burned several pieces of paper 
Hi! I got this torch a few days ago in grey with the XPL Hi, a small tube and 18350 batteries in addition to what comes standard. I’m literally blown away, but what gives me satisfaction on top of that is the face my friends make when they see it… The reason I signed-up today on the forum is, to let everybody know how happy I am that such exists, (I never knew about this community until very recently) but also to let you know what would make this torch the best ever in my usage scenario. Please don’t get me wrong, I totally love it, but even a Ferrari can be custom improved. Because the very small 18350 at 700mAh, the need for opening the tail-cap (or front-end, for the same matter) is to frequent in my opinion. A USB charging port would remove that necessity, make it more flexible (car charging, or any other on the go source), without the need of carrying a lot of spares or a charger. Secondly, I miss for some tasks a magnetic tail-cap. In my scenarios these two additions would make the D4 the only torch to have… Well, I also got two Q8s, but that’s another universe…
Thank you guys for the amazing job!
Welcome to BLF! You’re not going to hurt our feelings talking about how things could be improved/upgraded. That’s how a lot of the BLF specials like the Q8 got started! We’re fairly laid back around here, although we’re humans and still get grumpy sometimes. :smiling_imp: Feel free to offer your suggestions (respectfully, of course 
) on lights. I hope you stick around to see all the benefits of being part of this community!
Thank you, you are very kind. Like I said, mostly for the 700mAh, it would make a lot of sense to include a USB charging port; it would charge in less than an hour… For some different tasks it would be nice to be able to get as an accessory a tail-cap with a magnet. I understand that some people don’t like their things (inside a pocket) to hold to the magnet, but it’s great to have it handy if needed… So, maybe as an optional???
My buddy and I are working on a platform which integrates “smart ” capabilities practically to any torch… It will work in conjunction with an app and you will be able to do the entire set-up on your app and send it over to the torch. You will also be able to have different scenarios on hand and fast change them, as well as the entire information about the status, like used mAh, remaining mAh, brightness and so much more. He is reluctant to give it away as simply as that… I have no problem sharing, but I can’t do it without his approval…
You all have a good one!
In general, the optimal charging rate for li-ion batteries is about 0.5C to 1.0C, where C is the capacity. This means batteries ideally take about two hours to charge regardless of how much energy they hold. If it takes less than an hour, it’s most likely charging too fast.
The optimal rate varies depending on several factors, but if a cell is enclosed and insulated like it is inside most flashlights, the rate should be a bit lower so it won’t overheat. I’d be wary of a flashlight which charged its cell in less than an hour.
The FLEX Asgard did that. It wasn’t very successful. A lot of that had nothing to do with the programming features, but part was because people don’t really care much about programming their flashlights from a phone.
https://www.fasttech.com/products/0/10004469/1342000-flex-asgard-1052-lumen-programmable-cree-xm-l2
The HexBright flashlight did too, but over USB instead of bluetooth. It was pretty successful, but as far as I’m aware it was only a one-off project. Also pretty pricey for what it was, and not great for actual flashlight purposes. Could be nice if the idea was used in a better light.
I made a proof-of-concept last year for configuring or maybe even reflashing a flashlight entirely by blinking binary code at it from a computer screen, but I haven’t done much with it. The data transfer speed is incredibly slow, and it has only limited use cases. It’ll be more feasible with a MCU big enough to fit a bootloader, so the bootloader can handle reflashing the OS, but the chip I was using was nowhere near capable enough for that. But I’ll probably still flesh out the idea more eventually.
The most widely-used approach I’m aware of is to make the light’s MCU easy to reach and clip onto, or somehow expose the pins needed to reflash it, and then use common cheap programming tools from a computer over USB. At least, that’s how most stuff at BLF works. The BLF Q8 is particularly easy to reflash, since it doesn’t require any soldering.
That sounds great. The Foursevens Smart series had a similar feature with bluetooth, but they didn’t really take advantage of it (it was not possible to freely reprogram modes for example). And the light itself was quite complicated but lackluster and had hardly any instructions on the UI.
There are different ways to do it… I encourage you to check out the resources we have in a radius of 10 miles around our zip (98008) and you will easily understand… As far as ” people don’t really care much about programming their flashlights from a phone”, allow me to tell you that “people” are thrilled to do so… At least in our extended IT community of geeks who have different thinking patterns. As far as fast charging goes, the worst thing which can happen, is shortening the life of a $5 battery from 1000 cycles to let’s say 400-500… No big deal. In any case, thanks for your input.
CRX,
Thank you; 400mAh on top of the Efest 700 is a big deal. Just got a pair
Yes I know and for this reason we completely re-invent the way power is managed in the guts… In fact it’s super-easy; like I said it’s a different approach. What we do here has been proven to be the right way; we did the “something” which originated the major brand grilling monitoring (from your phone), smart home implementations, also from your phone… and a few more things which did sell to major brands under NDA, so please don’t ask… Now… Torches are a new hot thing for us, but it’s just another kids (nerd kids - that is) task… In real life we do work on serious shit; this is just us playing with code and some hardware like we used to do when we were kids… Just wait and watch! I checked-out your link; pretty cool but very different from our project. We are going to offer full custom control of a light producing device. Only the sky is the limit. There will be remote and scenario triggered sequences, home protection, alarms and so much more…
I still hope to pursue convenient methods of transferring data to a light. It can enable some pretty useful things. Specifically:
These things should ideally require as little change as possible to the host designs and performance. If it needs a USB port, for example, the host must be bigger and take extra care for waterproofing. If it uses a radio, it may require part of the host to be non-metal to allow transmission, and could impact battery life. It may be feasible to put pogo pads or something on the visible side of the driver, but that still requires a few dollars of extra hardware for the update process.
So I found a way to do it with no extra hardware, without changing anything except the driver — use the LED itself to receive data. The main downside is that the data would be transmitted from a phone screen or similar, which has a pretty low and highly variable refresh rate. So the transfers are slooooow. Sending a complete ROM would probably take hours. It could be done from almost any device though, by simply going to a web page and clicking a button while the light is held against the screen.
It may be preferable to use bluetooth instead, for ROM updates. But then there are a bunch of complications related to the radio, and related to the phone/PC side of the transaction. Some people have opted to put the radio under a plastic or rubber portion of the host (Manker Godmes, Quark Smart), some have tried to expose it through the reflector or optic (Flex Asgard). I haven’t seen one which did actual firmware updates that way though; so far it has mostly just been gimmicks.
This version, which works perfectly fine for someone like you and me, might be seen as rather complicated for the rest of the world… The concept you are talking about appeals best to a “click-happy” person, but in today’s world we also use displays which make more sense because YOU CAN ACTUALLY SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud your results using conventional options, but there is more; don’t you want to see the potential of MORE being unleashed?
hmmm ?
Yep…more words than action
a lot more words
Oh, um, Tterev3 made one with a display:
Some other people, and some companies, have also added displays to their lights. The Nitecore TM26, for example. I don’t recall offhand what the others were though. The idea seems to come and go periodically.
Thanks for the review, i just got mine in cyan with xpl hi.
When the tailcap is tighten, there are two blinks, I’m not sure if this have any other meaning or just a notification that it is ready to turn on. If it is just a notification, it would be much better if the blinks indicate the battery level, like 4 blinks if battery greater than 75, 3 blinks if greater than 50. So you know the battery level everytime you unlock the flashlight, without having go to battcheck mode and count 12 blinks (for example if battery is 3.9 volt, and don’t know 3.9 volt mean how many % left 
).
Also two method of showing battery level is also great. Please let me know if you think this is a good idea
On my firmware, the “power is connected” blink is much faster so it doesn’t really take any time. The slow blink was there because that’s how Tom likes it.
It could display remaining charge then, but it’d greatly slow down the process of physically unlocking the light for regular use. It also would need to wait a bit for voltage to stabilize before doing the measurement.
If this is a thing you want though, the firmware is available for modification. The simplest way would probably be to use Anduril, edit the setup() function to go into battcheck state instead of the “off” state, and edit the battcheck code so it’ll go to “off” state after one loop. And probably change the battcheck style to 4 blinks instead of volts+tenths, and perhaps speed up the blinking.
Another option is to make it do this only if the button is held at boot time. There is already a clause to handle this differently, though it isn’t compiled in by default. Usually I use “hold button at boot” for a different purpose though — factory reset.