Solarforce XM-L dropin blown, what to do now?

LEDBE
A

aussiebuddha

Enlightened
Joined
Aug 26, 2007
Messages
252
Hi guys.

Today I received and unfortunately burnt a Solarforce XM-L drop in.
It's one of the 3 mode (low-med-high) models that is supposed to do 3 to 6V.
Tried it with 2Xlifepo4 and I guess it was too much over 6v as they were freshly charged (big mistake)
point is.

It ran for about 5 seconds and started dimming.
When I realised and turned it off, I saw the emmitor a bit cloudy (I assumed it was burnt, but now on closer inspection, it looks clear as new) maybe my eyes were tricked and it was smoke.

Thing is, I'd like to see whether the emmitor is OK and maybe the driver is blown.

I've got some old drivers I used for Q5 ages ago, could I try with those?
Any way I can plug the led to something else for a quick try to see if it's dead dead?

thanks
 
Generally when the LED starts to dim due to over-voltage it means the damage has already been done...as in part of the emitter chip has been melted or burned beyond the ability to conduct current. An XM-L is fortunately large enough that any actual melted parts would probably be visible to the naked eye as brownish or black areas as opposed to the nice yellow chip. It's also possible that the connecting wires may have been melted through and thus no current would be passed through to that section of the chip. If the chip appears clear now then I recommend you go ahead and load up a SINGLE Li-Ion cell and see if it powers up...if it does then the dimming was due to the driver board trying to deal with the extra voltage rather than the LED chip burning away. If nothing happens then most likely the regulator circuit is fried and you will need a new driver board.

If you can still see the connector wires inside the LED and there is no obvious signs of a burnt chip through the dome then I suspect the LED is fine...I accidentally dropped two RCRs (I was in a lego mood that night and swapping everything around) into my Solarforce powered 6P not too long ago, the strobing when I powered it up was a quick indicator something was wrong (it was a single mode XM-L) and I realized my error...I would not have done it intentionally but I am supposing you were hoping to get more light out of it on a pair of them.

Obviously Solarforce's 3-6 volt drop-ins are running very close to the edge, my RCRs were not fully charged...I think they checked in at 7 volts or so.
 
IT'S ALIVEEE!

hehe. tried with a lifepo4 just to be on the low voltage side of things.

I started another thread to get more info on which driver to choose as a replacement for the dead one.
 
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