TW0K or TX1H?

sp5it

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Hello. I got a chance to but one of those bins locally in Poland.
I want to use 3 of it with trimag, and one as 3xNiMh direct drive with optional resistor.
Anyone can tell me which bin will be better? How is the tint in X1 compared to W0?
Thanks, Mike
 

Lexus

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W0 is considered to be quite white, X1 is one of the warmer bins, with a slight hint of green.
I prefer the X1, it seems more natural to my eyes. But each set of eyes is different.
On a white wall, W0 might look better, but X1 seems to render colors better especially outdoors with all those greens and browns of plants.

Bin codes are explained here:
http://home.comcast.net/~theledguy/bin_codes/index.htm
 
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cratz2

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Yeah, the tints and the voltage bins are 'ranges', not absolutes. Personally, if I was going to use one in a Q3 on an R123, the TW0K is absolutely perfect and the TW0K or TX0K would be my first choice. If I was going to due something with the perfect tri sink, I'd use the TX1Hs. Matter of fact, I've been playing with my tri Lux I light, trying different combinations of bins looking for the best color balance and so far, I've come up with 2 RW0Hs and one RX1H as the best combo. On a white wall from a couple feet, it looks pretty ugly, but outdoors, looking at browns and greens, it's VERY nice.

Honestly, they are both great bins... the Vf is likely to be more important than the tint with these two. Personally, I like W0, X0, Y0, YA and X1 about interchangeably as far as tint goes.
 

IsaacHayes

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I'd do the W0, it will look less green and more pure white, but not as cold white as X0.

If you are going to use a constant current regulated driver, the TX1H would be optimal because of the lower Vf.

If you are going to direct drive off of 3 NiMH, get the TW0K as the K Vf is perfect for NiMH. I have 3 TX0K's in my tri-mag running off of 3 C NiMH and it's perfect for them!!
 

kubolaw

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The W0 bin is my absolute favorite bin, in general (I tend to like the "colder" white output over the warmer X1). For a 3x NiMH setup with single emitter, I'd go with the TW0K without hesitation. But I think for a PTS, the lower Vf of the TX1H would be preferable to give your batteries more breathing room.

John
 

IsaacHayes

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If you are doing a PTS with NiMH stick to the K. They NiMH has no voltage drop so it will fry 3 of the TX1H in no time flat.

If you are doing a PTS with alkalines, then TX1H may be ok, as alkalines will sag under that heavy load and likely not put out over 3 amps to them because the voltage will be lowered so much.
 

cratz2

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IsaacHayes said:
If you are doing a PTS with NiMH stick to the K. They NiMH has no voltage drop so it will fry 3 of the TX1H in no time flat.

If you are doing a PTS with alkalines, then TX1H may be ok, as alkalines will sag under that heavy load and likely not put out over 3 amps to them because the voltage will be lowered so much.

True... my suggestion above was assuming use of alkalines... should have specified though.

ohgeez.gif
 

sp5it

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IsaacHayes said:
I have 3 TX0K's in my tri-mag running off of 3 C NiMH and it's perfect for them!!
What current is going through them? CAn you measure current from 3xD NiMh cells? Tia, Mike
 

sp5it

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IsaacHayes said:
If you are doing a PTS with NiMH stick to the K. They NiMH has no voltage drop so it will fry 3 of the TX1H in no time flat.
What Vf you mean? I will use 3xD NiMH with three luxeons paralel.
Mike
 

Turbo_E

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i used 3 W0 bins. they are great and very white. if i wanted yellowed green light id buy a regular Maglite.
 

IsaacHayes

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sp5it: I use C NiMH, but D would put out the same current, only with a longer run time. On freshly charged hot cells it's close to 3.1 amps, and after settling it's ~2.8amps. The Vf of the luxeons will drop over time, but with a T**K luxeon, it should still be in safe range of direct driving off of NiMH.

Go with the TW0K. It will be perfect for direct driving 3 parallel off of 3x NiMH cells. Same for a single luxeon as on 3x NiMH as well. It will be very white as well.

The Vf is the voltage rating of the particular luxeon. It is what voltage is required for them to pull their rated current. It is the last letter of the bin. K Vf is higher than H, which is very low. K is within range for direct driving NiMH. H is too low for NiMH which means it would fry as it would pull way too much current. But if you were using a step up boost driver, you would use the H vf as that means less work for the circuit to raise the voltage for the luxeon to draw it's rated current. That ends up giving you more run time.

Hope that clears it up!
 

sp5it

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All clear now. Thanks for answers. I ordered 4 of them, there will be fun with mag modding. Next step will be PTS2, but that`s diffrent story. I know where and how ;)
All the best, Mike
 

CroMAGnet

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IsaacHayes said:
sp5it: I use C NiMH, but D would put out the same current, only with a longer run time. On freshly charged hot cells it's close to 3.1 amps, and after settling it's ~2.8amps. The Vf of the luxeons will drop over time, but with a T**K luxeon, it should still be in safe range of direct driving off of NiMH.

Go with the TW0K. It will be perfect for direct driving 3 parallel off of 3x NiMH cells. Same for a single luxeon as on 3x NiMH as well. It will be very white as well.

The Vf is the voltage rating of the particular luxeon. It is what voltage is required for them to pull their rated current. It is the last letter of the bin. K Vf is higher than H, which is very low. K is within range for direct driving NiMH. H is too low for NiMH which means it would fry as it would pull way too much current. But if you were using a step up boost driver, you would use the H vf as that means less work for the circuit to raise the voltage for the luxeon to draw it's rated current. That ends up giving you more run time.

Hope that clears it up!
I'm a little confused here. First off, I have a TWOH bored out TriLUX magmod running 4 NiMHs with a fatman at 1A. Is this light going to run 3AA NiMHs to each LED? or 3AA total?


3NiMHs at 1.2v-1.4v each (not sure sag voltage on DD) or three at 3.6v-4.2v (without sag) Wouldn't the sag bring them down a little above H vf? say 3.2v-3.6v and is it really that bad to overdrive the LED by so little? Or maybe more desireable?

I am really posting here in an attempt to learn more from the forthcoming answers as the 18+ months on CPF have opened the door to a whole new field of learning for me. :)
 

IsaacHayes

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Cromag: we are talking about direct driving here, with the luxeons wired in parallel. Batteries directly connected to the luxeons. You are using a Fatman driver. Therefore it controls the current going to the leds. If you didn't have that fatman controling the current and hooked up 3 or more NIMH directly to the TW0H, you'd fry them in a heart beat. Their voltage is too low, therefore you'd be overdriving them.

NiMH has virtually no voltage sag. So 1.2v x 3 =3.6volts. K vf= ~3.6volts. So they are perfect for eachother. H is way lower, so you'd fry them.

Now alkalines sag voltage under heavy current demand. That's why if I put 3 alkalines in my try mag it won't pull 3 amps, even though the total voltage is higher because the cells start off at 1.5volts. But putting in 1.2vNIMH they won't sag and therefore the 3 luxeons will pull 3 amps.

LED's will be overdriven by just a few tenths of a volt over their rated spec. So just as little as .4volts more, and the led could be pulling well over 2x it's rated current, and frying. (I believe at ~2amps into a single luxeon the bond wires melt and fuse open!)

The fatman works by boosting voltage up. It works with luxeons in series. Series means you add the Vf of every luxeon up. Say your TW0H pull 700ma at 3volts. So 3 in series is 9volts total needed to go to the luxeons so they pull 700ma. The fatman will boost the 4.8 volts from your 4NIMH to 9volts. It does this by pulling more current from the batteries (more than the 700ma that goes to the luxeons). That is why with a boost circuit, it's important to have low VF luxeons (Like TW0H) because that's less volts for the circuit to boost, and therefor less current it has to pull from the batteries. Which means more runtime.

If you had a circuit like a downboy700, it takes a input voltage higher than the voltage required by your led, and steps it down to the correct level. In this case it pulls less current from the batteries than the LED is getting. It also increases runtime if you have a low Vf led in this case too.

Hope that helps :wave:
 

CroMAGnet

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IsaacHayes said:
Cromag: we are talking about direct driving here, with the luxeons wired in parallel. Batteries directly connected to the luxeons. You are using a Fatman driver. Therefore it controls the current going to the leds. If you didn't have that fatman controling the current and hooked up 3 or more NIMH directly to the TW0H, you'd fry them in a heart beat. Their voltage is too low, therefore you'd be overdriving them.

NiMH has virtually no voltage sag. So 1.2v x 3 =3.6volts. K vf= ~3.6volts. So they are perfect for eachother. H is way lower, so you'd fry them.

Now alkalines sag voltage under heavy current demand. That's why if I put 3 alkalines in my try mag it won't pull 3 amps, even though the total voltage is higher because the cells start off at 1.5volts. But putting in 1.2vNIMH they won't sag and therefore the 3 luxeons will pull 3 amps.

LED's will be overdriven by just a few tenths of a volt over their rated spec. So just as little as .4volts more, and the led could be pulling well over 2x it's rated current, and frying.I Didn't Know this. (I believe at ~2amps into a single luxeon the bond wires melt and fuse open!)

The fatman works by boosting voltage up. It works with luxeons in series. Series means you add the Vf of every luxeon up. Say your TW0H pull 700ma at 3volts. So 3 in series is 9volts total needed to go to the luxeons so they pull 700ma. The fatman will boost the 4.8 volts from your 4NIMH to 9volts. It does this by pulling more current from the batteries (more than the 700ma that goes to the luxeons). That is why with a boost circuit, it's important to have low VF luxeons (Like TW0H) because that's less volts for the circuit to boost, and therefor less current it has to pull from the batteries. Which means more runtime.

If you had a circuit like a downboy700, it takes a input voltage higher than the voltage required by your led, and steps it down to the correct level. In this case it pulls less current from the batteries than the LED is getting. It also increases runtime if you have a low Vf led in this case too.

Hope that helps :wave:
That helps a lot! Thanks IH. I'm catching on and will be modding a DD Minimag with Viren's copper heatsink soon. Any recommendations for a pcb?

I get confused with the amp parts when overdriving anything. Just the calculations mostly. Say you have a LiON CR2 with 4.2 off the charger like in my RAW DD UY0J. The little CR2 has 350mA (Some 310 or 300) and the J vf is 3.27V - 3.51V -- I know it wont be on the super high output for too long.

What is the voltage in that scenario?

Spec on the 3v LED being 750mA, if the LED draws 1.5a, is that 2c? And is anything over 2c in danger of exploding the LiON? as i read this paragraph I think that I'm mixing things upHow do you calculate the current in this?

This is getting lengthy. So the thread is talking about 9AA NiMHs? 3's in series?

or 3AA in series DD 3 LEDs in Parallel?

I guess either way would work.

I hope this isn't too convoluted and discombobulated LOL because it looks that way in my head right now.

Thanks for the help :)
 

MoonRise

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Stop. You are mixing apples, and oranges, and bananas. Great fruit salad or dessert, but not good for comparison.

The Vf is the voltage required to get the rated current through the LED. Remember that Ohm's Law applies. It's a law like Gravity is a Law, it almost always applies (certain limited exceptions excluded, your mileage may vary, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, don't forget to take out the trash).

You can connect things electrically in series or in parallel. Voltage and current are distributed differently in series and parallel circuits.

As an example, make a stack of 3 NiMH cells. The voltage of each cell is nominally 1.2 V (hot off the charger they may be around 1.4 V each), so if you stack the cells head-to-tail you now have 3.6 V available from the pack. You made a series stack of the cells, so you add the voltage of each cell to get the total voltage the stack can supply.

What about the current, you ask? Whatever 'load' is put on the stack, is the current that is going through each and every one of the cells. So if the load is 750 ma, then 750 ma is going through each cell in the stack.

But my cells are 2500 mah cells, you ask? That is not the current of the cells, but the millamp-hour rating of the cells. It is how many millamps for how long that the current can be supplied. Think of it as how big the gas tank is on a car, a bigger gas tank has more 'juice' and can run longer than a smaller tank.

If you wired the cells in parallel, you would have 1.2 V from the pack but your amp draw from each cell would be 1/3 of the total amp draw.

What happens when I use a driver board, you ask? The driver board takes power in and sends power out, minus some losses. Electrical power is volts x amps = watts. But the driver may change the relationship between the volts and amps from the source to the load. An example mentoined is the Fatman, a boost circuit. It takes lower voltage and higher current from the cell(s), and sends higher voltage and a lower (controlled, incidentially) current to the load (LEDs for us, usually). It might take in 1.5 volts and 2 amps from the power supply, and send 3.6 volts and 750 ma to the LED (these are example numbers only, but the relative values are close to real-world). Notice that 3 watts of power went into the driver board, but only 2.7 watts came out? The board used up 0.3 watts internally (in this example), because nothing is 100% efficient.

Now lets look at the load side of things. Wire up three TWOH LEDs in series, and you would need to supply them with a total voltage of 3 x 3.03-3.27 V or 9.09-9.81 volts total for the spec current of 750 ma. If you wired them in parallel, you'd need to supply them with 3.03-3.27 V but 2.25 amps (watch out here with a driver circuit because the current limit from the driver board may be over what any one LED can withstand by itself).

One LED direct drive off of 3xNiMH cells? Like IssacHayes said above, use the TWOK. Watch out for fresh off the charger cells, they could be at about 4.2 V total. Way overdriven, maybe magic smoke range unless a big enough resistor is in the circuit to drop things down a bit [around 1 or 2 ohms, depending on how daring you want to be].

Tri-mag with a driver board? Pick your prefered tint and decide how much you want tint versus a little more efficiency from a lower Vf.
 

IsaacHayes

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Cro: seems you need to learn a few basics first and termninology. Refer to the post above. A correction is luxIII rated spec is 700ma, not 750ma. A luxIII can be optionally powered at 1000ma. Of course the voltage to get it to pull 1000ma will be slightly higher than what it takes to pull 700ma.

This thread was talkign about 3x D-sized NiMH in series (~3.6volts), powering 3 Luxeons in Parallel (each led is connected to the batterys + & -. Each led will pull ~700-1000ma from the batteries 3.6volts, for a total current draw from the batteries ~3amps.)

And a Vf can vary within the range. A K could be higher or lower than others from a different batch. Mine happens to be great, and hot of the charger 1.35v cells doesn't overdrive them much (~60ma more per led, big deal). But yet when the cells are cool/used a bit 1.2v each is still enough to drive them at 700ma or more.

So if you got a K that was at the low end, and then hot cells might overdrive them a bit. I'd recommend .5ohms. 1 is probably too much.

Usualy though you want to use some sort of electronic driver to keep the current regulated so it doesn't get out of hand. It just happens K vf works pretty good 90% of the time with 3x NiMH DD.

The 2C you refer to is the discharge limit for cells. C= capacity. So if your cells are 2000mah capacity, that means 2C would be a discharge of 4000ma. If 2C is the max for your cells, any higher draw would be dangerous. Yes you are mixing things up! :)
 

CroMAGnet

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Hey you guys, on behalf of all the people reading this thread and laughing out loud or learning O lot, I thank you.
dancing222.gif


I'll have to sort thru the info later this weekend. TMI for right now.
 

sp5it

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One more question. What if i will use shark driver and three luxeons in series from 3xD NiMH? What should I expect? Longer runtime, or it is waste of money and I should stay wth 3 Luxeons paralel direct driven?
Mike
 

cratz2

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I thought I had a pretty strong grasp of these concepts (being a physical chemistry major and having built a couple such lights) but after re-reading this thread, I need to go take some asprin.

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