Don’t let people sell you flashlights unless they’re super cheap and super reliable. :) Especially avoid buying rescue or air defense searchlights - if a product contains the word “rescue” or “defense”, its price will cause a jumpscare. Optics isn’t a secret art, Wikipedia has all the relevant information - and if you happen to have a solar concentrator with a reasonable focal length, you have a searchlight waiting to happen. :)
Photo taken from 968 meters.
P.S. Just remember: LEDs need to be current-limited and cooled. :)
Head on over to !flashlight@lemmy.world and start that new
addiction, I mean, hobby.Edit: fixed formatting.
!flashlight@lemmy.world so it’s clickable
deleted by creator
In that short period they function more like an incandescent bulb than a LED tho. Also at that power the correct three letter acronym might be IED instead…
Generally speaking yes, but there are some exceptions.
For example, flashlights intended to be attached to a firearm DO incur a premium for a good reason. They’re subjected to intense sudden movement and vibration, repeatedly, and it takes a lot of extra hardening and redundancy to develop a light that can repeatedly withstand that kind of abuse without eventually knocking core components loose. If you were to try to attach a tactical light intended for airsoft/bb use to a real firearm, its not going to last long. There’s a reason gun lights are as expensive as they are.
Is it possible to diy a headlamp? I’ve always thought it’d be kinda cool and silly to have an obscenely bright flashlight, but I prefer headlamps because it leaves my hands free (and it’s automatically pointing at whatever I’m looking at, for better or for worse).
Sure, you can pick from a whole world of different LEDs, and drivers. But there are also a bunch of cheap headlamps that are small and bright.
It sure is possible.
A typical “obscenely bright” LED chip might be Cree XML, but many similar chips exist. You’d need a plano-convex or equivalent Fresnel lens - shorter focal lengths favour compact design. Then you need a driver. Some are fixed while some adjustable with a tiny potentiometer. You’d need an 18650 cell holder (it can be made too, an 18650 will go into a leftover piece of 20 mm electrical cabling pipe with a spring-loaded metal cap engineered of something).
Myself, I bought a nice head lamp, but it broke after one year. The driver board failed. Being of the lazy variety, I replaced the board with a resistor to limit current and now it’s been working 3 years already. Not at peak luminosity, the resistor wasn’t optimal of course. :)
