Max
Enlightened
Here's an idea I thought I might toss out to those of you who are performing flashlight runtime plots.
The standard disclaimer on any time vs. light plot is always that the graph shows what happens during continuous use, and that performance under intermittent use will differ.
I would be curious to see what it would look like to see a plot of intermittently used flashlight.
For example, let's say that you wired up the flashlight in such a way that a relay was inserted into the battery path that could be turned on and off by computer. One run would consist of turning on the flashlight and recording the light output for say 2 minutes. Then you would turn off the light and let the batteries recover for a bit and then repeat.
At the end of the run, you would have hundreds, if not thousands of these 2 minute segments. If you take every 10th (or 100th, depending on what kind of battery time we're talking) plot and overlay them on top of each other, you get a sense of how the performance changes as the batteries are depleted.
What might you see? Some of those unregulated lights might start to look flatter when you always start with rested batteries. Likewise, some of those really long runtimes might start to look overly optimistic when you consider that rested batteries are going to crank more current initially.
Anybody tried this?
The standard disclaimer on any time vs. light plot is always that the graph shows what happens during continuous use, and that performance under intermittent use will differ.
I would be curious to see what it would look like to see a plot of intermittently used flashlight.
For example, let's say that you wired up the flashlight in such a way that a relay was inserted into the battery path that could be turned on and off by computer. One run would consist of turning on the flashlight and recording the light output for say 2 minutes. Then you would turn off the light and let the batteries recover for a bit and then repeat.
At the end of the run, you would have hundreds, if not thousands of these 2 minute segments. If you take every 10th (or 100th, depending on what kind of battery time we're talking) plot and overlay them on top of each other, you get a sense of how the performance changes as the batteries are depleted.
What might you see? Some of those unregulated lights might start to look flatter when you always start with rested batteries. Likewise, some of those really long runtimes might start to look overly optimistic when you consider that rested batteries are going to crank more current initially.
Anybody tried this?