Own The Night With This Ludicrously Bright DIY Flashlight

November 8, 2021 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

If you’re a flashlight person, you know that there’s little you would do to get the brightest, most powerful, most ridiculous flashlight possible. You might even decide to build yourself a ludicrously powerful flashlight, like [Maciej Nowak] did.

If you choose the DIY route, be warned that it’s probably not going to be a simple process, at least if you follow [Maciej]’s lead. His flashlight is machined out of aluminum rounds, all turned down on the lathe to form the head of the flashlight. The head is made from three parts, each of which acts as a heat sink for the five 20-Watt CREE XHP70 LED modules. The LEDs are mounted with care to thermal considerations, and wired in series to DC-DC converter that provides the necessary 30 V using a battery pack made from four 21700 Li-ion cells. The electronics, which also includes a BMS for charging the battery and a MOSFET switching module, form a tidy package that fits into the aluminum handle.

The video below shows that the flashlight is remarkably bright, with a nice, even field with no hotspots. Given the 45-minute useful life and the three-hour recharge time, it might have been nice to make it so anywhere from one to five of the LEDs could be turned on at once. Some interesting effects might be had from switching the LEDs on sequentially, too.

Given the proclivities of our community, it’s no surprise that this is hardly the first powerful flashlight we’ve seen. This one broke the 100-Watt barrier with a single COB LED, while this ammo-can version sports an even higher light output. Neither of them looks much like a traditional flashlight, though, which is where [Maciej]’s build has the edge.

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101 Uses For An Everready — Flashlight History

September 29, 2021 by Al Williams 53 Comments

For some reason, I’m always interested in why things are called what they are. For example, I’ve been compelled in the past to research what Absorbine Senior is. Not that it is important, but Absorbine Junior is a smaller size of horse liniment, so you don’t have to buy a drum of ordinary Absorbine just to rub down your sore thumb. So it isn’t a mystery that I would find myself musing over why we call a flashlight a flashlight.

You don’t think of a flashlight as flashing, under normal circumstances, at least. Turns out the answer lies in the history of the device, its poor beginnings, and our willingness to treat imperfect components as though they were much better than they are. That last point, by the way, still has ramifications today, so even if you aren’t a fan of flashlight history, keep reading.

Portable Lighting

Ever since people learned to use fire, there’s been a desire for portable lighting. Torches, candles, and even oil lamps have all had their place. But burning things for light in small cramped spaces leaves a lot to be desired. It isn’t surprising that people quickly turned to electricity when that seemed to be feasible.

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

August 31, 2020 by Donald Papp 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.

Anode of each LED goes to the center, cathodes to the outside ring.

LED leads are melted-in with a soldering iron.

9 V battery pressed to the bottom of the conductive block lights up the LEDs.

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.

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Emergency Torch Runs Without Batteries

February 14, 2020 by Lewin Day 29 Comments

It’s always good to have a torch on hand for emergencies. Unfortunately, sometimes these torches can be forgotten, and wind up with dead batteries when you need them most. For those cases, this build from [techrallyofficial] is just the ticket.

Instead of a battery, the torch relies on a 1.5 farad supercapacitor to store energy. The body of the torch is constructed out of PVC pipe and fittings, and packs strong neodymium magnets inside. A coil of wire wrapped is formed around an old solder spool, which, when shaken past the magnets, generates a current. This is rectified with a series of diodes and charges the supercapacitor, powering the light.

It’s a classic design that is available commercially, but it’s one easily replicated in the home shop, too. It would make a great educational project, particularly as students would be left with a useful device to take home at the end of the lesson. We’ve seen others resurrect commercial builds with upgrades, too. Video after the break.

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A Supercapacitor Might Just Light Your Way One Day

January 12, 2020 by Jenny List 32 Comments

Sometimes the simplest hacks are the most useful ones, and they don’t come much simpler than the little supercapacitor LED flashlight from serial maker of cool stuff [Jeremy S. Cook]. Little more than an LED, a supercapacitor, USB plug, and couple of resistors, it makes a neat little flashlight that charges from any USB A power socket and delivers usable light for over half an hour.

It’s neat, but on its own there’s not much to detain the reader until it is revealed as a “Hello World” supercapacitor project from an article in which he delves into the possibilities of these still rather exotic components. Its point is to explore their different properties when compared to a battery, for example a linear voltage drop in contrast to the sharp drop-off of a chemical cell. In the video below the break we see him try a little boost regulator to deliver a constant voltage, with consequent severe loss of lighting time for the LED. It’s by this type of experimentation that we learn our way around a component unfamiliar to us, and the article and video are certainly worth a look if you’ve never used a supercapacitor before.

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Ammo Can Holds A 14,000 Lumen LED Flashlight

March 28, 2019 by Tom Nardi 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.

The Undead Remote

July 28, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

In the very late 1990s, something amazing was invented. White LEDs. These magical pieces of semiconductors first became commercially available in 1996, and by the early 2000s, you could buy a single 5mm white LED for less than a dollar in quantity one. A year or two later, an astonishing product showed up on infomercials airing on basic cable at 2 a.m. It was a flashlight that never needed batteries. With a small white LED, a few coils wrapped around a tube, and a magnet, you could just shake this flashlight to charge it. It’s just what you needed for when the Y2K virus killed all electronics.

Of course, no one uses these flashlights now because they suck. The early white LEDs never put out enough light, and charging a flashlight by shaking it every twenty seconds is annoying. There is another technology that desperately needs a battery-less solution, though: remote controls. They hardly use any power at all. That’s exactly what [oneohm] did for his Hackaday Prize entry. He created the Undead Remote.

The dream of a battery-less remote control has been dead since your parents got rid of that old Zenith Space Command, but here it is. This is really just a shake flashlight, a diode rectifier, a large capacitor, and some glue. Shake the remote, and you can change the channel. Is it useful? Certainly. Does it look weird and is it slightly inconvenient? Also yes. But there you go. If you want an easy way to deal with batteries in your remote control, this is a solution.