Silva Cross Trail II tear down

Hi,

I am new to this forum, but I read many threads of reviews on bike lights and headlamps as well a the modifications howtos. As it looks like, nobody dared to open up a Silva X-Trail, X-Trail Plus or the Cross Trail II model up to now and since I was able to get a Silva Cross Trail II for a reasonable price, I give it a go and made a tear down of it.

Cross Trail II:


Please bear with me, it's my first time of a tear down, but I hope it is interesting for you and maybe some readers have idea and suggestions for modifications.

The Silva Cross Trail II is the successor of the Silva X-Trail and Silva X-Trail Plus. The main different is ofcourse the 250 Lumen instead of 145 Lumen of the old X-Trail.

Old X-Trail:


However a cool feature was the usability of Lithium-IO battery packs instead of 4xAA batteries when you buy the Plus instead of the standard version.

Well, this option was gone with the new Silva Cross Trail II, so I was wondering if the new one is still capable of using higher voltage Li-IO battery packs.


To get to the main board, you have to apply a good amount of heat the metal ring of the case.
The ring is not screwed on, so you can just pop off after a while. The same technique with heat and gentle pulling can be used with the plastic ring after the meat ring and the button rubber is removed.





Before you can pull out the main board, you have to remove the power cabling on the opposite side.

First remove the silicone blob, open up the cable restrainer and then desolder the cabling.




Then you can gently pull out the board.





On the left side you can see the microcontroller PIC16F505 which uses as input the switch on the left side and controlls the two 5mm LEDs for surrounding light the battery indicator LED (below the middle center hole) and the main high power LED in the middle of the board. On the right side you see an active step down (Buck) converter (TPS62110), which works with input voltage of 3.1V to 17V. The TPS62110 is able to provide up to 1.5 Ampere.


The high power LED in the middle is unknown (up to now). The measurement I did:
The base of the 3,5mm x 3,5mm
The dome is 1,25mm high (not including the base plate)



The lens has a diameter of 18mm and is 10mm high. The holding clips which fit into the main board are all exactly 10mm away from the center LED.



...
I have a few more photos at my website, but I am not sure how to upload the whole gallery. See: http://www.danand.de/index.php/electronics/teardown-silva-cross-trail-ii/

Cheers,

Daniel

What I missing was my idea's and intentions of what to do with the lamp. And thats where I need a bit help from the viewers.

1)
I checked out the CREE XP-L family specs ( http://www.led-tech.de/produkt-pdf/cree/XLampXP_B&L.pdf ) and it may be such a CREE LED, but I am not really sure. If someone has an idea how to figure out which LED it could be, I would be very happy.

2)
Since I would love to use 8.4V Lithium-Ion battery packs of my Magicshine 808 (and clones) bike lights, the converter is surely able to handle the higher voltage, but if someone have a look at the main board if there are any critical things I have oversee that could prevent using a higher voltage battery pack than the stock 4x AA pack, please let me know.

3)
I would like to use the headlamp for my trail runs. I am not so happy with the narrow light of the central highpower LED and also the two 5mm LED for the surrounding are just too dark. I have good experience with 0°/30° wide filter lens at the Magicshine 808 models, so maybe a similar solution on this smaller scale 18mm diameter lens would be cool, but I haven't seen anything that small up to now.


Cheers,

Daniel