M*gLED take apart

While purusing the flashlight isle at my local Home Depot today I chanced upon some M*glight drop in's. I purchased one for a 4 cell light, as I was going to try to make it fit into some non-mag lights that I own.

Unfortunately, they have gone out of their way to make it not fit into anything but a M*g as the can is too big around. But what they didn't do was pot the internals in any way. the construction is really quite smart making for easy assembly, and consequently, easy disassembly!

the LED is epoxied to the top of the can and the leads go down through slots in the top. Looking at them I thought it looked like clips that held the Luxon lines and not anything soldered, so on a whim (and since it didn't fit in any light I had here) I grasped the base of the black plastic on the bottom and gave a gentle pull and it began to slide right out!



pulling it the rest of the way reveals the converter board, in this case a down converter.



You can then grab that with your fingers and pull it right off the leads to the luxeon which is all thats holding it at this point.





The luxeon is a custom job, at least I've never seen one with leads like this, they are about a quarter of an inch long paddle shapes rather than the little surface mount pads that we're familiar with.

The luxeon can easily be pried off the top of the can with a little effort. You might want to pay attention to the polarity of the led and the board as now that I have mine out i can't see any indication of what should go where... Have to figure that out.

I actually think that $16 or so for a decent 3W luxeon and an easy to mod board like this will be a great source for mods! It took 2 minutes to get this apart and I'm left with EASY to reconnect in some other configuration parts!

Cool!

A buck circuit and an LED for $16. You can't beat that with a stick
as long as the led is a decent bin. :laughing: I wonder what the converter can handle?

Can you post a picture of the LED?
MM

Good Job. I am very interested in what the maximum input voltage is that the converter can handle.

Interesting about the Luxeon. Could they be having a special one made for them with custom leads?

I dont know how to figure out what the maximum voltage would be other than test one to destruction If you'd like to do that please be my guest

The LED starts to light right around it's forward voltage 3.4v or so, I assume the device is in direct drive mode at that voltage, but it reaches full regulated output between 4 and 6 volts. I didn't push it beyond 6 yet.

turns out it was easy to figure out which side of the converter was the ground, it's connected to the negative input terminal of course, so I was able to ohm it out. The negative terminal on the board is on top, between the 2 led clips where it made contact with the can. The positive terminal is on the bottom where it made contact with the tab in the center of the black plastic insert.

I can't seem to find my good digital camera, probably lost at the bottom of a baby bag somewhere... Or someone "cleaned" up and put it away where I'll never see it again. But I'll use my old one this afternoon to take a pic of the strange LED setup.

(Oh, and be careful when prying the led off the can, initially you may discover that it rotates slightly and try to work it loose by going back and forth. But then you'll notice that while the case of the LED is turning, the slug is still glued tight and the feed wires are moving inside the LED! And if you turn it too far, or too many times, they will break off...)

Brlux said:

Good Job. I am very interested in what the maximum input voltage is that the converter can handle.

Interesting about the Luxeon. Could they be having a special one made for them with custom leads?

Click to expand...

You can find more photos of it, with links to some of the parts datasheets, and some efficiency measurements, here:
http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=119665

Due to some of the parts used, you will not get the efficiencies shown on the datasheet.

Now, how did I miss the fact that NewBie already had a huge thread on this? Oh well, my interest is not in making better maglights, but in using these for other things entirely So I'm not concerned about the heat sinking or lack thereof as I will be providing my own. He does have a pic of the custom LED connections in that thread though for the folks that want to see that.