Hi guys,
I found a Gilan Navigator through a local website for second hand stuff.
The light had a problem. It wouldn't turn on properly. It would just light up for a fraction of a second and then go out again.
After taking it apart, I noticed that the microcontroller is always under power, and it probably got stuck in a bad state due to repeated discharging and charging the battery. Unplugging the battery for a minute and plugging it back in solved that issue, but still, it was a halogen lamp so I couldn't resist to mod it.
It has a ring with magnet as a switch. This triggered a hall sensor connected to the microcontroller. Since I took out the electronics, I replaced the sensor by a hallsw from taskled.
For the optics, I was hesitating between a 50mm fresnel lens that I already used in one of my greenforce mods and a 45mm optic from Gaggione.
The Gaggione 45mm optic LLC49R promisses a half angle for an XML of 3.7°. A full angle of 7.4° looks nice and some people prefer to have some spill so I decided to try this optic.
Since the original halogen bulb was an MR16, I needed to create a ring on my lathe to support the optic. This didn't cause any issues.
I then created a heatsink for the LED and did some tests with the magnet, switch and driver.
During these tests, I noticed that the DX driver sku 128269 didn't work well with the hallsw. For some reason, the driver was interfering with the switch.
Probably the magnetic field of the inductor latched the hall switch, as it didn't turn off when I removed the magnet.
Replacing the driver by sku 106303 solved this issue. I modified the driver to have only a high mode. I'm not sure how much current it actually gives, but it looks pretty good.
The battery is a 7.2V NiMh battery, so should work fine with the driver.
Here are some pictures of the result:
modified light head
This gives a better view of the ring in which the lens is held in place:
beamshot
The ceiling was 2.1m away, the image is about 2m wide. The lamp is about 36cm wide. I'll try to make a more precise beam angle measurement later.
Here the image is not saturated:
This is a comparison with my greenforce mod and a 50mm fresnel lens. The greenforce uses an unknown bin XML from DX, the Gilan uses a XML U2 on a copper round star from Led-tech.de and probably a better bin than the DX led. The color is different at least.
a comparison of the beam profile of the 2 optics:
I'm happy with the result. I'll probably sell the light to a buddy after testdiving it myself to see how I like the beam underwater. That will have to wait until the water gets a bit warmer though...
The magnetic ring is rotating over an O-ring giving some friction, but there is no locking mechanism to prevent accidenlty turning it on when outside the water.
Any suggestions to implement a sort of locking mechanism?
Johan
I found a Gilan Navigator through a local website for second hand stuff.
The light had a problem. It wouldn't turn on properly. It would just light up for a fraction of a second and then go out again.
After taking it apart, I noticed that the microcontroller is always under power, and it probably got stuck in a bad state due to repeated discharging and charging the battery. Unplugging the battery for a minute and plugging it back in solved that issue, but still, it was a halogen lamp so I couldn't resist to mod it.
It has a ring with magnet as a switch. This triggered a hall sensor connected to the microcontroller. Since I took out the electronics, I replaced the sensor by a hallsw from taskled.
For the optics, I was hesitating between a 50mm fresnel lens that I already used in one of my greenforce mods and a 45mm optic from Gaggione.
The Gaggione 45mm optic LLC49R promisses a half angle for an XML of 3.7°. A full angle of 7.4° looks nice and some people prefer to have some spill so I decided to try this optic.
Since the original halogen bulb was an MR16, I needed to create a ring on my lathe to support the optic. This didn't cause any issues.
I then created a heatsink for the LED and did some tests with the magnet, switch and driver.
During these tests, I noticed that the DX driver sku 128269 didn't work well with the hallsw. For some reason, the driver was interfering with the switch.
Probably the magnetic field of the inductor latched the hall switch, as it didn't turn off when I removed the magnet.
Replacing the driver by sku 106303 solved this issue. I modified the driver to have only a high mode. I'm not sure how much current it actually gives, but it looks pretty good.
The battery is a 7.2V NiMh battery, so should work fine with the driver.
Here are some pictures of the result:
modified light head
This gives a better view of the ring in which the lens is held in place:
beamshot
The ceiling was 2.1m away, the image is about 2m wide. The lamp is about 36cm wide. I'll try to make a more precise beam angle measurement later.
Here the image is not saturated:
This is a comparison with my greenforce mod and a 50mm fresnel lens. The greenforce uses an unknown bin XML from DX, the Gilan uses a XML U2 on a copper round star from Led-tech.de and probably a better bin than the DX led. The color is different at least.
a comparison of the beam profile of the 2 optics:
I'm happy with the result. I'll probably sell the light to a buddy after testdiving it myself to see how I like the beam underwater. That will have to wait until the water gets a bit warmer though...
The magnetic ring is rotating over an O-ring giving some friction, but there is no locking mechanism to prevent accidenlty turning it on when outside the water.
Any suggestions to implement a sort of locking mechanism?
Johan
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