Zebralight SC64 Anduril Edition

Flashlight Modding and DIY Parts
21

My man!

22

What an amazing piece of work!

23

The SC64 is really a great design. Apart from being very difficult to mod it has a lot of advantages over an FW3A or Emisar D4.

  • Itā€™s slimmer, which makes pocketing a bit easier.
  • The unibody construction offers unmatched thermal performance.
24

Oh yeah, plus I really like the look of it.

25

what is the red light ?
thanks

26

The red light ? There is some of the red light from the RGB led bleeding below the base of the reflector, reflecting on a solder blob and then the reflector that we see at the end of the video, is that what you meant ?

27

thatā€™s It, what I meant. that looks neat too.
thanks.

28

Actually all colors bleed like this, although blue less, probably because of the position, but also itā€™s weaker than the other colors (the blue red mix is more toward pink than purple), I should have used a slightly lower resistor value.

29

a lower resistor, maybe, but this still makes it look unique for a ZL.

30

Oh and thanks to Gchart for adding DAC control for the Atinny 1 series in Anduril 2, I wouldnā€™t have been able to do it and it makes the drivers much simpler (less components) and the ramping very smooth (perfect transition between the two power ranges).
Also thanks to Toykeeper for Anduril!
As well as id30209 who taught me how to open Zebralights without breaking the glass :smiley: . Also Bob just a few days ago about how to remove the switch retaining ring.

31

you have the greatest support behind you there.

32

So cool! Could you tell us more about the driverā€™s specs like regulation performance, efficiency, etc?

33

Itā€™s a 6A constant current HDR buck driver, like this one I made for the FWAA , but limited to 4.25A as I thought that was more appropriate for the LED and host.

The efficiency is the same as this one :

I call it a HDR driver because it switches between two different current sense resistors to achieve a large current range. The ramp looks like this :

(Shows a minimum of 70uA but I manually modified the calculated ramp afterwards to go down to 28 uA, can do 14 uA min).

The thermal regulation isnā€™t working very well (steps down too soon) at the moment though, Iā€™m pretty sure thatā€™s due to the MCU (thermal sensor) being on the same PCB as the LED so it heats faster than the body.

34

Awesome, congrats!

35

WoW

Great work and skills :+1:

Regards Xandre

36

What happens when LED voltage is higher than battery voltage? (e.g. when you go to top of ramp when battery is low)

Is it possible to compensate by setting thermal threshold higher within Anduril?

37

Dud driver built last year :

Versions : 3 PWM controled ones and the DAC one with fewer components :

38

The current starts to drop at some point, however it should be at a lower voltage than the SC64 LE because my driver has a lower dropout voltage and the 519A has a lower Vf than the LH351D.

Doing some quick measurement, with Vin (+pogo pins and -tube contacts) =
3.37V : 4.24A
3.33V : 3.90A
3.26V : 3.36A
3.18V : 2.71A
3.10V : 2.14A
2.97V : 1.30A
2.95V : 1.22A

Then it steps downs due to LVP, a bit too soon actually, it seems to read a lower voltage than in reality.

It helps a bit but itā€™s not a good solution since the light will get too hot afterwards.

Maybe something like in the Lume1 FF code will help, it only steps down from turbo when the temperature reaches therm_ceil + TURBO_TEMP_EXTRA. But I donā€™t think this function has been added into the main branch.

39

nice but - guessing it is out of my budget!

40

Lights like this and others that only enable the FET at the very last ramp step (i. e. lights with the lume driver like FF NOV-Mu and FW3X) are the reason why we need the ability to switch the thermal regulation behavior at compile time. I'd love to update my lights with dc/dc + fet drivers to newest anduril but turbo mode would become pretty unusable as it is now :/