100% Printed Flashlight: Conductive Filament And Melted-in Leads

August 31, 2020 by 28 Comments

Conductive filament isn’t an ideal electrical conductor, but it’s a 3D-printable one and that’s what makes [Hercemer]’s 3D-printed flashlight using conductive filament work. Every part of the flashlight is printed except for the 9 volt battery and LEDs. Electrically speaking, the flashlight is a small number of LEDs connected in parallel to the terminals of the battery, and turning it on or off is done by twisting or loosening a cap to make or break the connection.

The main part of the build is a 3D-printed conductive cylinder surrounded by a printed conductive ring with an insulator between them. This disk- or pad-shaped assembly forms not only the electrical connection between the LEDs and battery terminals, but also physically holds the LEDs. To attach them, [Hercemer] simply melts them right in. He uses a soldering iron to heat up the leads, and presses them into the 3D-printed conductive block while hot. The 9 V battery’s terminals contact the bottom when the end cap is twisted, and when they touch the conductive assembly the flashlight turns on.

Anticipating everyone’s curiosity, [Hercemer] measured the resistance of his conductive block and measured roughly 350 ohms when printed at 90% infill; lower infills result in more resistance. You can see a video of the assembly and watch the flashlight in action in the video, embedded below.

Continue reading “100% Printed Flashlight: Conductive Filament And Melted-in Leads” →

Ammo Can Holds A 14,000 Lumen LED Flashlight

March 28, 2019 by 10 Comments

For most people, a flashlight is just something you keep in a drawer in the kitchen in case the power goes out. There’s even a good chance your “flashlight” is just an application on your phone at this point. But as we’ve seen many times before from mechanical keyboards to Power Wheels, hardcore niche communities can develop around the most innocuous pieces of hardware; and the lowly flashlight is no different.

Case in point, this 14,000 lumen LED flashlight built by [Bryson Hicks]. Designed around a 100 watt module from Stratus LED, the flashlight uses a number of 3D printed components to make itself at home in a suitably hardcore enclosure: a metal ammo can. With the addition of some modular electronics and a rather slick little control panel, his light is ready to deliver an unreasonable level of brightness anywhere he wishes.

The Stratus LED module includes its own driver, and just needs to be hooked up to a suitably beefy power source to do its thing. [Bryson] went with a 4500 mAh LiPo battery that he says gets him about a one hour runtime at full brightness. For somewhat less intense operation, he’s added a potentiometer which interfaces with the module’s driver board to control the LED output. Considering how fast the light sucks down the juice, adding a small LCD battery charge indicator to the top of the device seems like it was a prudent decision.

To prevent you from cooking anyone’s eyes at close range, the light requires you to first “arm” it by flipping the military style protected switch. Once the switch is in the on position, an illuminated push button is used to actually turn the LED module on and off. You can also snap the toggle switch back into the closed and covered position if you needed to kill the light in a hurry.

This isn’t the first preposterously bright LED flashlight we’ve seen around these parts. There’s something of an arms-race between hackers and makers to develop increasingly bright lights they can carry around, on the off chance they need to illuminate an entire neighborhood.

A Flashlight Powered By Your Hot Little Hands

July 5, 2018 by 18 Comments

We are smack-dab in the middle of our Energy Harvesting Challenge, and [wasimashu] might have this one in the palm of his hand. Imagine a compact flashlight that doesn’t need batteries or bulbs. You’d buy a 10-pack and stash them everywhere, right? If there’s nothing that will leak or break or expire in your lifetime, why not have a bunch of them around?

Infinity uses nothing but body heat to power a single white LED. It only needs a five-degree temperature difference between the air and your hand to work, so it should be good in pretty much any environment. While it certainly won’t be the brightest light in your collection, it’s a whole lot better than darkness. Someday, it might be the only light around that works.

As you might expect, there’s a Peltier unit involved. Two of them, actually. Both are embedded flush on opposite sides of the hollow aluminum flashlight body, which acts as a heat sink and allows air to pass through.  After trying to boost the output voltage with a homemade feedback oscillator and hand-wound transformers, [wasimashu] settled on a unipolar boost converter to reach the 5V needed to power the LED.

[wasimashu] has made it his personal mission to help humanity through science. We’d say that Infinity puts him well on the way, and can’t wait to see what he does next.

The HackadayPrize2018 is Sponsored by:

Supercapacitors In A Servo: The “Forever” Flashlight

May 30, 2018 by 21 Comments

The principle is well understood: use a motor in reverse and you get a generator. Using this bit of knowledge back in 2001 is what kick-started [Ted Yapo]’s Hackaday Prize entry. At the time, [Ted] was searching for a small flashlight for astronomy, but didn’t like dealing with dead batteries. He quickly cobbled together a makeshift solution out of some supercapacitors and a servo-as-a-generator, hacked for continuous rotation.

A testament to the supercapacitors, 17 years later it’s still going strong – leading [Ted] to document the project and also improve it. The original circuit was as simple as a servo, protection diode, some supercapacitors, and a LED with accompanying resistor; but now greater things are afoot.

A DC-DC boost converter enables constant power through the LED, regardless of the capacitor voltage. This is achieved by connecting the feedback pin of an MCP1624 switcher to an INA199 current-shunt monitor. The MCP1624 kicks in at 0.65V and stays active down to 0.35V. This is all possible due to the supercapacitors, which happily keep increasing current as voltage drops – all the way to 0.35V. Batteries are less ideal in this situation, as their internal resistance increases as voltage drops, as well as increasing with age.

When testing the new design, [Ted] found that the gears on his servos kept stripping when he was using them to charge capacitors. Though at first he attributed it to the fact that the gears were plastic, he realized that his original prototype from 2001 had been plastic as well. Eventually, he discovered the cause: modern supercapacitors are too good! The ones he’d been using in 2001 were significantly less advanced and had a much higher ESR, limiting the charging current. The only solution is to use metal gear servos

Want to read more about boost converter design? We have the pros and cons of microcontrollers for boost converters, or this neat Nixie driver for USB power.

The HackadayPrize2018 is Sponsored by:

Disco Flashlight Binary Analog Clock?

May 30, 2017 by 2 Comments

As multitools have lots of different functions in one case, so [Shadwan’s] clock design incorporates a multitude of features. He started the design as a binary clock using a Fibonacci spiral for the shape. However, the finished clock has four modes. The original binary clock, an analog clock, a flashlight (all lights on), and a disco mode that strobes multiple lights.

[Shadwan] used Rhino to model the case and then produced it using a laser cutter. The brains are — small wonder — an Arduino. A 3D-printed bracket holds everything together. You can see the result in the video below.

Continue reading “Disco Flashlight Binary Analog Clock?” →

High-Power LED + 3D Printer = Mega Flashlight

January 14, 2017 by 19 Comments

If you remember old computer magazines (or browse them today), you’ll see that back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you weren’t always sure what you were going to do with a computer. Games were a staple, but they weren’t very exciting. Visionaries talked about storing recipes, writing Christmas letters (to send via snail mail), and keeping home inventories. You probably don’t do any of those things with your computer today, unless you count e-mailing instead of sending Christmas cards. We think sometimes 3D printers fall into that category today. Sure, you want one. But what are you really going to do with it? Print keychains?

That’s why we always like seeing practical designs for 3D printed items. Like this 100W flashlight. The electronics part of the build is simple enough: a 100W LED module, an off-the-shelf driver board, plus an old PC cooler and some batteries. But the 3D printed parts makes it all come together and it looks great!

Continue reading “High-Power LED + 3D Printer = Mega Flashlight” →

Infrared Flashlight With Screen Uncovers What’s Hidden

August 1, 2016 by 17 Comments

Flashlights are handy around the house, but what if you want a stealthier approach to illuminating the night? Infrared LED flashlights can be acquired at relatively low cost, but where’s the fun in that? To that end [johnaldmilligan] spent a couple hours building an infrared flashlight-gun with an LED display to venture into the night.

[johnaldmilligan] disassembled a handheld spotlight to use as the housing, leaving the trigger assembly and 12V DC charge port in place. A miniature camera was used as the video source after removing its infrared filter. Note: if you do this, don’t forget that you will need to manually readjust the focus! The camera was mounted where LED Array Diagramthe flashlight bulb used to be instead of the LED array since the latter was impractically large for the small space — but attaching it to the top of the flashlight works just as effectively. The infrared LEDs were wired in eight groups of three LEDs in parallel to deliver 1.5V to each bank and preventing burnout. Here is an extremely detailed diagram if that sounds confusing.

Continue reading “Infrared Flashlight With Screen Uncovers What’s Hidden” →