I sometimes see pictures of emitter on stars and the stars have screw type connections for the emitter’s wires rather than soldered connections.
Why isn’t this more common? If someone made copper pills with pre-drilled holes for the wires and screws it would be simple to swap emitters and to be able to utilize copper pills for better heat sinking and make it easier to overdrive emitters as well.
Got any links of that? I've never seen one. Copper is way too expensive to ever be mainstream. Hard to get and high priced (pure copper), the stuff I see that says copper on it, is usually alloy and not much better than aluminum, but I would like to see what you are talking about. I hate soldering!
Of course now that I’ve posted the question I can’t find any pictures of what I’m talking about. If I find something I’ll post a link.
Xtar D-30 uses screws...
He said screws for the wires, not emitter base.
And I would go even further. Why not make the emitter have pins that would go into sockets on the driver, like how you install a processor into the socket of a mobo.
Amen! I'd rather fart with tiny screws than soldering.
I don't think that would enable very good heatsinking. A typical XM-L runs at roughly 3.5 V at 3 A, which means around 10 W. To dissipate 10 W you need darned good heatsinking. You could probably use a press-fit socket if you used a thermal compound underneath the LED body, but the heat transfer would not be as good as it is with a soldered connection, and therefore you would only be able to run the LED at low currents. Once you get to higher currents, the LED would overheat.
But really the reason that the LEDs don't have press-fit pins is that LEDs are not designed by Cree and other mfrs to be used in flashlights. :)
Probably it raises costs too much... you would have to use 2-piece base plates and 2-piece mounts to screw your screws in (polarities) .... you are looking at an increase by probably several dollars per light. These emitters aren't constructed for assembly by hand but solder robots. They rarely complain that soldering is too hard... the base plates (stars) are already a concession to clumsy humans.
Oh right... oops.
It would probably raise cost, increase part count and might increase the occurrence of failure and poor assembly quality.
-LED +/- wires would need eyelet terminal that would still need to be crimped or soldered.
-DC-DC board would need an SMT mounted threaded fastener for the +/- LED screws.
-Its also 2 more through holes to drill on the PCBA.
I actually didn't realize factories like these used robots for led soldering. It would certainly raise the cost significantly in respect to the over all cost of the budget flashlights.
No they don't ... I wasn't talking about flashlights, when talking about industrial roboters.... flashlights with high power emitters are rather an "accident"/"side effect" for the industry.
Thanks for all the feedback. Regarding emitters with pins that plug into the driver I do have one flashlight like that but it’s 30 lumens max.
soldering an emitter is connecting 2 wires .
it could be simpler ....but not much .