Testing the Madmax

I just tried out my new madmax. I widenned the lip of the minimag as the illpill installation instructions suggest so no contact with the lip occurs with the terminals to the luxeon as the sandwich is rotated in the body.

I noticed that it makes a difference what minimag color you choose to install the madmax into. I use a low voltage setting on the madmax sandwich and at this level of light the minimag's body color has a pronounced effect on the light output, at least it seems to to my naked eye. I have silver and purple minimags. The purple puts out a slightly purple beam and it is noticeably darker than the brighter silver beam. It's more than luxeon diversity. It is darker as it is purple. The collimator must be picking up a lot of the light reflected off the inside of the head. The purple head doesn't reflect as much light as the silver.

I also adjusted the voltage on the trimpot. I got an opalec newbeam and turned it on and adjusted the madmax till its output was equal to the newbeam. Then I slowly increased the voltage on the trimpot until light increased above the newbeam. The light really jumps from newbeam level to 2 or more times newbeam level with just the slightest turn. I'm going to keep my madmaxes set at this level, which is about 1/3 to 1/2 the light output of my arc ls hybrid second. I'm now going to charge a fresh set of 1850 mah kodak nimh AA's and see how long the madmax will stay in regulation for.

I really like the madmax. I really like the fact that it's adjustable. It does maintain regulation well for nimh batteries according to the plot at wayne yamaguchi's shop. It is the alkalines that have a horrible regulation curve with this sandwich. Since I use nimh only it doesn't affect me. I didn't like the kroll or ram tailswitches. The minimag tailcap works good enough and seems more durable to me. I had problems with the other switches I don't want to go into here because of time. I'm now eagerly waiting for my mineral glass lenses.

If these madmaxes on low voltage give me 3 to 4 hours of runtime with these batteries then I will be very pleased.

If you have a multimeter, you can check how much current the madmax is drawing. If you don't have one, go get a cheap $10 one. It's good enuff. Make sure you can measure current to 10 amps.

When you know the current used by the madmax, you can roughly figure out how many hours of light you can have.

NO...

You cannot use a multimeter to measure the current to the module. There is too much drop and some other wierd stuff happens. I've never heard one person on CPF get a reliable reading with a DMM.

Please keep this in mind when making measurements. This is a low voltage circuit. Any small voltage drops will affect circuit operation. This is a 3V system here. Most IC's used to run on 5V, now 3.3. Not that this is a digital circuit, but, I think you get the point.

Also, the graphs on my web page are with the modules taxing the batteries pretty hard.

If you have turned down the Madmax to something less, then, you will find that Alkalines or NiMH will be much happier and hold regulation way better than the graphs I show on my web page.

If you need to do testing, ensure the leads are good heavy gauge, they are very very short, and you use a 0.1 ohm resistor 1% in series with your circuit you want to measure the current.

I think you would only need to back off 20% from Max and you would still have tons of light and good decent run times.

I'd love to hear what kinda of run times you do get if you this testing.

Wayne

Well, here is an update. This is a naked eye visual testing. Nothing fancy. But, very practical.

This madmax is a funny thing. After 4 hours and 10 minutes of constant brightness (I hung two madmax's around my neck on lanyards from the minimag tailcap) something clicked like when the arc ls goes into moonmode there's a click in the light output visually not audibly. And ever since then the madmax has slowly but steadily INCREASED IN BRIGHTNESS. It is now 5 hours and 40 minutes since I started the constant on run test on two identically set up madmaxes, and now the two madmaxes are about 4/5 the brightness and light output of my arc ls hybrid seconds with the new dat2zip green board in the arc head running the 400 circuit.

I guess when you set the madmax at a low setting, it actually increases in brightness as the batteries die and the circuit begins to seriously compensate. I am using good batteries. They are 1850 mah Kodak made in Japan nimh from thomas distributing. I bought 15 more packs of the new maha 2000 mah nimh AA's but they aren't getting to my house till next week, and even so, I kind of wanted to stay with the same 4 kodaks till they die one day after 500 or 1000 or whatever cycles.

now it's 5 hours 50 minutes. This is a great flashlight. You know I thought that these two madmax's were just going to be emergency lights that I could use to get long battery life from my rechargeables, but that it would come at a steep price of dimness like the opalec newbeam. I thought that I was going to put my saphire lenses on my lambda cyan dcdc illuminator and an ill pill. But, I may have to put the mineral glass on those and save the saphire lenses for these. I don't have lambda's flashlights to test yet, so maybe they'll still get the saphire lenses. At, $20 each lens only my favorite 2 AAflashlights are going to get them. The rest get mineral glass.

It is now 6 minutes before the flashlights hit the 6 hour mark and they are going STRONG. This is MUCH MORE THAN I HOPED FOR. With my maha c401fs charger hooked up to my solar panels, I can charge 4 AA batteries in 100 minutes (1850 mah batteries). But I have 5 mahac401fs chargers, each with its own solar rig. So, I can charge 20 AA batteries in 100 minutes OF SUNSHINE.

With WAYNE YAMAGUCHI's madmax cranked low, I know I can get more than 6 hours of light per 2AA batteries. THat's 12 hours of full night time for just 4 AA batteries. But, who knows? It may be even better yet for the flashlights arestill burning bright and it is 1 minute till 6hours right now. I won't go to sleep till they kick out of regulation. They're around my neck so I can't miss it when it happens.

Once again, I used the opalec newbeam to set these lights trimpots. I had to turn on the madmax and check its beam on the ceiling next to the opalec newbeam. THen I dumped out the madmax and turned the trimpot with the pliers and reinserted overand over till it came out right. In this manner I first set both madmaxes till they matched the opalec newbeam in visual brightness on the ceiling 1 or 2 feet or so above my head. Then I slowly turned up the madmax just ever so slightly. There is a point where the trimpot turns just barely noticeably but the light output jumps all of a sudden from the dim opalec newbeam's dark nichia led type of beam to a much more intense luxeon beam. Yet, it is not putting out as much light as the arc ls. It appeared to put out half light of the arc. But much of that was sidespill light around the center hotspot. The madmax still had a decent center hotspot. I found I could still cast in the vacant lot in the dark behind my condo and see a good ways off like with the arc. It wasn't as bright but close enough. Now this light is good for survival purposes as far as its runtime is concerned. It also puts out a hell of a lot more light than the opalec newbeam when the distance to the target increases. The nichia's just don't cast well.

I definately like this light and am happy I listenned to my own reasonning in interpretting Wayne's graphs. The regulation of NIMH rechargeables by the madmax seems to be superb. Wayne's graph shows however that alkalines suck with the madmax. Your graph Wayne actually makes the madmax look better than the badboy for rechargeables because the bad boy dips low in light output in the beginning and increases, while the madmax jumps and then decreases both converging to the same light output before dying. The badboy even died a little earlier according to your graph.

6 hours and 10 minutes and I'm a very happy man. That other guy posted 4 hours, but he was going for light output just below the arc ls. But, I'm going for light output at that magic point above the opalec newbeam where the luxeons juice just kicks in and begins to shine.

I'm very interested to see if these lights are going to give the opalec newbeam a run for its money as far as runtime is concerned.

I'll post later the results.

Finished finally.

Both madmaxes have nosedived to 1/2 the output of an opalec newbeam and I turned them off to prevent NIMH damage.

This is the summary of the runtime of the madmax with the trimpot set as described above:

A First 4 hours are constant brightness

B Next 2 hours brightness starts increasing slowly till a little less than arc ls

C Over the next hour the madmax starts to die towards opalec newbeam levels.

D Over next half hour madmax rapidly plunges from opalec newbeam level to 1/2 opalec level and dropping like a rock so I switched it off to prevent irreversible chemical damage to the batteries.

Comparison with Opalec Newbeam:
(By the way I see Craig is now back home as his Led Museum is now active again)

From Brock's webpage testing the opalec newbeam with 1800 mah nimh AA's, we see that it dies at about 9 hours. http://www.uwgb.edu/nevermab/battery.htm My madmax went strong for 6 hours. It still performed well through the seventh hour,at least as well as an opalec newbeam. It died in the first 30 minutes after seven hours continuously running.

SO I'd say the opalec newbeam gets 9 hours on NIMH rechargeables but at dimmer light levels, while the madmax gets 7 hours of runtime most of which is significantly brighter than the opalec newbeam. This is not bad considerring that both are running off of 2 AA NIMH batteries of about the same mah approx 1800. For only 2 hours difference in runtime the madmax offers a lot more for lots of tasks than the opalec newbeam. It will only take 4 AA batteries to get through the night, assuming these batteries are NIMH rated 1850 mah or better. Also, I live in southern California and the temperature is very comfortable tonight. In cold runtimes decrease such as in Alaska or the Idaho rockies. But, where I live right now 4 AA batteries is more than enough for one full night from 6pm to 6am. It'll even be more with 2000 mah maha AA powerex batteries.

I really like these flashlights. My opalec newbeam has good runtime but is really useful inside the house. Outside the beam just is too dispersed. The madmaxes perform nicely while walking from my condo tothe community pool and jaccuzzi, which I did tonight as well. Its beam doesn't disperse like the newbeam outside. And it lasts about as long.

You describe having to make some changes to the lip of the M@gL*te and I'm curious about this. I've never tried to install one of these in one of those so I don't know what is necessary, but I have a BB500 in a Brinkman 2AA and it required no messing around like that. Also there seems to be pleanty of room around the luxeon and there is no danger of it shorting against the case at all.

However, as I've described before, there was some metal shavings or dust inside the threads which did fall into the pill and temporarily cause some problems till it burned off. Yes, it made smoke as it burned off the luxeon leads! But this did not damage the pill at all, more credit to the builder

So i think that the Brinkman might be a better donor light for these!

Lambda's instructions said any touching could destroy the sandwich. My sandwich came close to touching when rotated into all possible positions. Since this was my first sandwich I was paranoid. I don't want it to self destruct. I never plan on using the minimag for anything else. So I was just playing it safe. I made a larger hole for an extra margin of safety.

That is for sure. The M*** has a smaller hole than the Brinkmann.

I think either module of mine will survive quite a bit of torture. I don't know of a single one yet during development or use that has died due to the output shorting. Well, ummm, there is one in Singapore...

Shorting the output momentary will not damage either module. Leaving it on with it shorted will possibly cause damage. I've seen BB's with the output dead shorted and my power supply just grunts and moans.

In the 5W setup, the BBs are more likely to fry.

BTW: If there is enough low power fans or demand, I could entertain making Madmaxs with the 1675 instead of the MAX1674. It has less output and is more efficient. More efficient??? Yes!

I think Max output would be limited to around 300mA or so with the 1W Luxeon.

(Man, I'm bad... talking to myself...)

Wayne

Originally posted by dat2zip:
...
BTW: If there is enough low power fans or demand, I could entertain making Madmaxs with the 1675 instead of the MAX1674. It has less output and is more efficient. More efficient??? Yes!

I think Max output would be limited to around 300mA or so with the 1W Luxeon.

..

Wayne

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I think most people are buying the Max for the lower output feature. I for one would definately be interested in a lower output more efficient Mad Max!

I also had the same experience where if you turned the pot just a tiny bit it would jump from Opalec output to ArcLS output. I could never achieve anything in between.

Originally posted by dat2zip:
BTW: If there is enough low power fans or demand, I could entertain making Madmaxs with the 1675 instead of the MAX1674. It has less output and is more efficient. More efficient??? Yes!

I think Max output would be limited to around 300mA or so with the 1W Luxeon.

Click to expand...

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I am certainly interested. Any chance of Q bined Luxeons? I have a MadMax that I've turned down slightly - measures about 550Ma input with freshly charged NiMH batteries. With new Alkaline batteries I get 3 hours of bright light, followed by over an hour of light equal to my PT Attitude, followed by 50 hours of light that matches my CMG Infinity. Amazing.