I’m pretty sure any light would be able to sustain much higher output when mounted on a drone. All that air hitting the light will greatly help to keep it cool.
There are lights where you can disable thermal stepdown, they will get hot! Like 80 degC, but when there is enough airflow, it should run cooler.
what’s your weight limit?
A BLF Q8 for example would be great, (with disabled stepdown)
but its a bit heavy.
A bicycle light with external battery pack might meet your criteria too.
I agree, I always consider “Turbo” and “Burst” a temporary output.
ANSI-NEMA FL-1 is to blame for the misinformation. Most (all?) manufacturers call the highest mode ‘turbo’, indicating that this mode has a characteristics much different from the remaining mode set. This is fair marketing imo, especially if you think of all the cheaters with their 1,000,000 lumen pocket lights and their 50,000 mAh batteries they have to compete with. I think especially Sofirn, being a budget manufacturer, suffers from those cheaters.
I would look at dropping the body, battery, and switch as pointless weight, and power a single mode head from the drone battery through a voltage convertor instead, or use a 12v driver/LED to match your drone batteries. Or if you already have a usable 5v supply on your drone you could run a 3v LED through a buck driver.
This is what i advised a friend do on his.
Obv you’d need to waterproof it, i can’t remember what my friend used but he built his own drones and coated the electronics with some silicone or resin type stuff. And if you’re feeling adventurous you may be able to incorporate a remote control relay in the circuit to switch it on and off.
If you go this route though you’re probably going to need a fixed current driver rather than a FET-based one.
Personally i think the torch you linked too is going to be too floody for your purpose unless you’re always going to be close to the ground, if not you either want a bigger head or a smaller LED in the head size you linked to. If you want to stick to simply adding a full torch to the drone then have a look at the Wildtrail BLF D80v2 with an SST40 which is a great searchlight with excellent heat-dissipating capabilites, or there’s an XP-L HI version for a more focused beam with a bit more range that you might find more suitable. It’s 80g heavier and more expensive than the torch you linked to though but i think it will be a far more suitable beam than anything smaller and lighter.
Does the drone have any ability to control switches? Some lights (Fenix is one example) have accessories available which replace the tailcap with an alternative kind of switch, like a pressure switch on a cable. You could hack the pressure switch part off and wire it into the drone. If it has the ability to fire switches when you could have an array of lights and switch between them in order to keep turbo power going for longer.
For search and rescue I would imagine you need not just throw but flood as well, i.e. you want as much light over as much distance and area as you can get.
If controlling switches via the drone isn’t possible it would probably be simple enough to build a tiny AA-powered controller circuit that would switch between the lights periodically. As a quick example suppose you had two Fenix PD36R mounted and a controller circuit to cycle between them. I would guess that the turbo runtime of one at altitude would be plenty enough time for the other light to cool down enough to get back into turbo. You just need to figure out how long to run each one for before switching over. Some experiments at different altitudes and ambient temperatures would probably give you enough data to know this with some certainty, then you could perhaps add a simple temperature sensor to the controller circuit.
I could easily program an arduino board to do this for you and they’re tiny, lightweight and run for ages on a tiny lightweight li-po battery. Shout if you want me to help.
Mark
Just realised Marc E is right - at height you want a more focused beam than the PD36R. PD32v2 is very focused but only 1200 lumens. Maybe you should start by determining how far you need the beam to reach and then look at light options from there.
Most SAR drones seem to favour night vision and or thermal cameras (from what I’ve seen) presumably due to the quite large weight / reduced range and flying time regular flashlights with batteries would add.
I did find this though LINK which may be of some use to you / inspiration.
Isn’t that a scene from the movie Terminator?
yeah bike light + lipo.
But if you want serious amounts of light:
DIY is an option. Why not make an actively cooled LED light with 100W or something.
That will give you some serious light output.
The heatsink can definitely be a lot smaller and lighter, you’re only trying to keep the LED below 80°C while operating.
For a fan, I’d look at (for example) Nidec, they make server fans. high RPM = lots of airflow = way better cooling may even give you accidental lift 
I’d size the lipo (capacity) so that the LED + fan discharge it by 50% for the maximum flight time of the drone (how long it can stay in the air). Calculating that in watt-hours would be easiest.
That way, you can swap both batteries when it needs to land and the batteries will last a long time since they aren’t fully discharged.
To be fair, your criteria of lumens per grams, without any reference to throw, beam pattern, run times, color temperature, etc is totally useless to everybody else. If you’re going to put two lights on it,you would probably be better off with one highly concentrated spotlight and then a more traditional beam for the second one. Consider Manker MC13. Aim the spotlight up above the lesser light just slightly. Similar to a car headlights with high and low beam on at the same time.
I’m also curious to know what you’re actually trying to achieve with it. Is this professional search and rescue that you think might be aided by a drone with lights on it? Prototype for a product to be offered to search and rescue? What kind of terrain will it be used over?
Six sofirn SP35s… I would think thats more than enough to light up ~100-150 feet. Thats not too far, but I don’t think it will be a tight spot (let others correct me). Not sure about the driver circuit in that light, but hypothetically you can tame the heat/output with different capability 21700 cells. One thing I am 100% certain about is that light at its brightest setting really shouldn’t be run continually ON. If it gets continuous airflow and cooling from the drone props and flight movement, that should help though.
A lot of it will come down to the cameras used, since you can only get so much lumens / candela per unit mass & volume space you have for your lighting solution. Small cameras and large / light capturing CCDs don’t normally go together… at least not in the civilian segment.
Whatever MAX throw distance Sofirn specs, I doubt they have factored camera CCD light capturing into that distance specification.
Good Luck!!
That’s what always amuses me about these threads, “what light to use for dog-walking”, “what light to use on a drone”, “what light to use on my farm”, etc.
Proposal #1… shootdown #1. Proposal #2… shootdown #2. Proposal #3… shootdown #3. Everyone spins their wheels tossing out suggestions, not knowing what the goal is except for some generic “I want…” statement.
But, it’s fun to watch! :laughing:
I want the moon on a stick. And a pony.
Moon? No.
Pony? I can ask around…
I was thinking of getting a dog but now it looks way too complicated.
way off
Way Out.