“World’s Brightest” Flashlight

April 10, 2016 by 46 Comments

With the crazy extremes of light flux density that are possible these days, we’re putting quotation marks around “world’s brightest”, but it’s abundantly clear that this flashlight build is very much too bright. No, really. Why would you want a flashlight so bright that you have to wear sunglasses to look at anything that’s within a twenty foot radius?

Because you can. [Mads Nielsen] combined 18, one hundred Watt LED units with some giant machined heatsinks, fans to cool those heatsinks, lenses, and other hardware to make a device that turns electrons into photons at an alarming rate. Each chip-on-board LED package requires 32 Volts, and they’re pairwise in series so it’s a 64 V system. A boot converter pushes up the twelve LiPo battery packs up to the required voltage.

Even with the relatively high voltage, this thing sucks in 27 A, so the power supply is distributed among four of these boost converters. All of this means thick cables and a rather hefty power switch. When you’re designing something ridiculous, all of these little details come out of the woodwork. We’ve included part one of the four-part build video here, because they’re full of great detail. [Mads] has a lot more interesting LED-related info on his YouTube channel. You can watch the showing-off video on your own time.

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Turn A Free Flashlight Into LED Strips

March 8, 2016 by 34 Comments

Harbor Freight is always trying to sweeten the deal by throwing in a free flashlight, or a multimeter with a CAT III rating so poorly-met it might as well be a hand grenade. We usually donate the meters to our local hackerspace, but the flashlights tend to accumulate around the shop. Aside from borrowing the occasional magnet, we’ve not found a good use for them till now.

[Ben Brandt] realized that a ultra-low cost board such as the one likely to be in a free flashlight is probably going to contain a very easily hackable single-sided board. Which is exactly the case here. Once the plastic casing is removed it’s only a quick trip to the saw until you have four fresh mini LED strips.

[Ben] uses his hacked loot to build a neat little, “Thanks For Watching,” sign. We can picture lots of places these could fit in the occasional project, and the work to break these up into parts is less than making equivalent boards with any proto technique. We love his wooden battery compartment. Video after the break.

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Fixing Broken Monitors By Shining A Flashlight

January 22, 2016 by 67 Comments

[dyril] over on the EEVblog has a broken LED TV. It’s a fairly standard Samsung TV from 2012 that unfortunately had a little bit of corrosion on the flexible circuit boards thanks to excessive humidity. One day, [dyril] turned on his TV and found about one-third of the screen was glitchy. After [dyril] took the TV apart, an extremely strange fix was found: shining a light on the corroded flexible circuit board fixed the TV.

The fix, obviously, was to solder a USB light to a power rail on the TV and hot glue the light so it shines on the offending circuit. Solving a problem is one thing, though, understanding why you’ve solved the problem is another thing entirely. [dyril] has no idea why this fix works, and it’s doubtful anyone can give him a complete explanation.

The TV is fixed, and although you can’t argue with results, there is a burning question: how on Earth does shining a light on a broken circuit board fix a TV? Speculation on the EEVblog thread seems to have settled on something similar to the photonic reset of the Raspberry Pi 2. In the Raspberry Pi 2, a small chip scale package (CSP) used in the power supply section would fail when exposed to light. This reset the Pi, and turned out to be a very educational introduction to photons and energy levels for thousands of people with a Pi.

The best guess from the EEVblog is that a chip on the offending board handles a differential signal going to the flex circuit. This chip is sensitive to light, and shutting it down with photons allows the other half of the differential signal to take over. It’s a hand-wavy explanation, but then again this is a very, very weird problem.

You can check out [dyril]’s video demonstration of the problem and solution below. Thanks [Rasz] for sending this one in.

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90,000 Lumen Flashlight Is Illuminating, Impractical And Blindingly Good

November 27, 2015 by 58 Comments

It may be better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness, but that was before [RCTestflight] came up with this: a 1000W LED flashlight that outputs about 90,000 lumens of light. That’s a lot: the best pocket LED flashlights output about 700 lumens.

[RCTestflight] built this monstrosity using ten 100-Watt LEDs, running off two RC car batteries. Each of the LEDs is connected to a sizable voltage converter and a very large heatsink that holds all of them in place. He says he gets about 8 minutes of light out of this thing, and that the heatsink gets warm after a minute or two of use. We’re not surprised: LEDs are more efficient than most other devices at converting electrical energy to light, but some always gets lost as heat.

Check out the video after the break. It’s very impressive, but this thing isn’t particularly practical as a handheld. It is big, heavy and is visible for miles. If you really want to light something up it does a great job (for a short period of time) due in part to the inclusion of a glass lens for each of the LEDs. This effectively focuses the beam on a properly distributed area. We wonder what would happen if all the beams were focused on one point? As long as you don’t cross the streams…

We have covered a few more practical builds using similar LEDs, but this thing does have a certain outrageous charm, and could be useful for high-speed video, where the more light, the better.

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Heat Duct Rover Explores Stink, Rescues Flashlight

November 12, 2015 by 32 Comments

It all started with a bad smell coming from the heat register. [CuddleBurrito] recalled a time when something stinky ended up in the ductwork of his folks’ house which ended up costing them big bucks to explore. The hacker mindset shies away from those expenditures and toward literally rolling your own solution to investigating the funk. In the process [CuddleBurrito] takes us on a journey into the bowels of his house.

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Build A 100W LED Flashlight

May 21, 2015 by 58 Comments

In case you’re not aware, you can hop on your favorite online Chinese electronics retailer and buy a hundred Watt LED module for less than $10 USD. That’s an enormous amount of retina-burning fun, but how do you turn it into a flashlight? DIY Perks shows you how.

The main issue when dealing with these large LED modules is heat. Even though there’s many times more efficient than incandescent bulbs per Watt, that’s still an incredible amount of heat that needs to be removed. There’s a piece of equipment you might have sitting around that does just that: the lowly CPU cooler.

If the CPU heatsink and fan are big enough, the LED module can be attached right to the bottom. With a DC to DC boost converter modified so the entire flashlight can be powered from a LiPo cell, this unit is completely portable, ready to take camping, or even for some very interesting videography.

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Hacklet 43 – Flashlight Projects

April 17, 2015 by 10 Comments

Mankind has always looked for ways to light up the night as they walk around. Fires are great for this, but they aren’t very safe or portable. Even kept safe in a lantern, an open flame is still dangerous – especially around cows.  Enter the flashlight, or torch if you’re from the other side of the pond. Since its invention in 1899, the flashlight has become a vital tool in modern society. From patrolling the dark corners of the city, to reading a book under the covers, flashlights enable us to beat back the night. The last decade or so has seen the everyday flashlight change from incandescent bulbs to LEDs as a light source. Hackers and makers were some of the first people to try out LED flashlights, and they’re still tinkering and improving them today. This weeks Hacklet focuses on some of the best flashlight projects on Hackaday.io!

light1We start with [Norman], and the LED Flashlight V2. Norman built a flashlight around a 100 Watt LED. These LEDs used to be quite expensive, but thanks to mass production, they’ve gotten down to around $6 USD or so. Norman mounted his LED a custom aluminum case. At this power level, even LEDs get hot. An extruded aluminum heatsink and fan keeps things cool. Power is from a 6 cell LiPo battery, which powers the LED through a boost converter. It goes without saying that this flashing is incredibly bright. Even if the low-cost LEDs aren’t quite 100 Watts, they still put many automotive headlights to shame! Nice work, [Norman].

light2A tip of the fedora to [Terrence Kayne] and his Grain-Of-Light LED LIGHT. [Terrence] loves LED flashlights, be he wanted one that had a bit of old school elegance. Anyone familiar with LEDs knows CREE is one of the biggest names in the industry. [Terrence] used a CREE XM-L2 emitter for his flashlight. He coupled the LED to a reflector package from Carlco Optics. The power source is an 18650 Lithium cell, which powers a multi-mode LED driver. [Terrence] spent much of his time turning down the wooden shell and aluminum tube frame of the flashlight. His workmanship shows! Our only suggestion would be to go with a lower profile switch. The toggle [Terrence] used would have us constantly checking our pockets to make sure the flashlight hadn’t accidentally been activated.

light3Harbor Freight’s flashlights are a lot like their multimeters: They generally work, but you wouldn’t want to trust your life to them. That wasn’t a problem for [Steel_9] since he needed a strobe/party light. [Steel_9] hacked a $5 “27 LED” light into a stylish strobe light. He started by cutting the power traces running to the LED array. He then added in an adjustable oscillator circuit: two BJTs and a handful of discrete components make up an astable multivibrator. A third transistor switches the LEDs. Switching a load like this with a 2N3906 probably isn’t the most efficient way to do things, but it works, and the magic smoke is still safely inside the semiconductors.  [Steel_9] built the circuit dead bug style, and was able to fit everything inside the original plastic case.  Rave on, [Steel_9]!

If you want to see more flashlight projects, check out our new list on Hackaday.io! That’s about all the time we have for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!