SammysHP

What weirds me out about this is that the charge LED just shows as fully charged when I connect it…

Is it trickle charging at that point, do I plug it in and leave it?

Could be as simple as a bad spot weld on the battery. When the charging circuits floating, it might see the input voltage on its output and no current and interpret it as a fully charged battery. Could also be a damage of the protection circuit or even an internal damage in the battery.

Don't try to charge it. Something is wrong with the battery and you don't want to burn down your home.

I just want a sane non-enthusiast light with Anduril, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Sane = among other things, no thermally unsustainable modes, no gratuitous battery incompatibility, and no excess mass added to the light just for heat sinking.

That's why the current generation of "enthusiast lights" uses switching drivers for higher efficiency. The Z1 is only slightly longer than the ZebraLight SC65, which is one of the smallest 18650 lights available.

It doesn’t seem to me that any enthuisiast Anduril lights have seen real effort to make the lights small. They just don’t like button tops.

Oh, they do. Maybe you should take a closer look at their construction.

If you want a short light, try the FFL Z1 that is to be released soon.

All Wurkkos 18650’s that I’ve gotten so far have been button tops, so I expect the 21700’s are similar.

Don't assume, it's easy to find photos of the batteries online. What do you see?

I do seem to remember that button top 18650’s don’t fit in my D4v2 but maybe I’ll try again to confirm.

Sure, if you want to crush your driver. The flashlight is made for flat top batteries.

I had thought maybe flat tops enabled more contact area between the spring and the battery, but looking at some springs it doesn’t seem that way.

The button adds a little bit of resistance, but it's negligible.

Still, many “enthusiast” lights are chonkers already, so why insist on flat tops? For that matter, all 21700 lights are chonkers by almost by definition (people wanting compact lights use smaller batteries).

And many enthusiast lights are built as compact as possible considering their performance. The head has a minimum size to host the emitters and driver, but the battery tube can stay short. 21700 lights allow for more capacity, allowing longer runtime or higher current draw with only slightly larger size.

The standardization of “standardized” battery sizes tbh seems pretty poor. I’d expect all 18650’s to be 65mm long, and so on. But they vary considerably.

All 18650 cells are 65mm in length. But third party manufacturers can add extras like buttons and protection circuits, making them longer.

Anyone know what the deal with this is? Is it just lumenitis? It also occurs to me to call that “lumen bloat”, similar to Javascript bloat. I’m an experienced enough user to not care about that any more.

What do you mean? Button vs flat top has nothing to do with the performance of the light. The button is just an extra piece of metal spot welded on the positive terminal. Some flashlights require buttons for mechanical reverse polarity protection and some flashlights are built as compact as possible and thus require flat top batteries.

For a headlamp I prefer a floody beam since if I want to check out something in the distance, I can pull a handheld thrower from my pocket.

Beam shape and battery type are unrelated.

Yeah, maybe I'm a little biased because I can also fit an LT1 in my pants. 🤪

That's why I mentioned it in the review:

there is a USB-C port for charging the built-in battery.

It is not replaceable by the user with a standard battery.

Boost drivers have a big advantage: Much higher efficiency, especially on low brightness. There are great examples like drivers designed by thefreeman or loneoceans. Unfortunately Wurkkos' engineers are still learning.

Is moonight done with PWM?

It's a boost driver with PWM input, probably low-pass filtered, but from what I heard it's rather unstable.

Thanks! The clip feels very solid and I don't think it's weaker than any other part of the light. And even if something breaks, it costs only about $15.

Sorry, I completely forgot to write about the material, as anything other than aluminum is an exception in the lights I review, so I don't even mention it anymore.

The body and clip are made completely out of aluminum, with a steel pin in the hinge.

It drains a battery in about three weeks on high aux.

AFAIK aux LEDs should turn off at 2.7V. Was it sitting at high aux level?

If you have access to a 3D printer: While I haven't tried it myself yet, it should be possible to combine my plate with Spicy3d's HB3 adapters.

In addition to the advantage mentioned by Zak, it also depends on the usage. A flashlight that I need every evening (dog walks) is easier to charge with the magnetic charger. Not great for the battery, but I prefer to have a fully charged flashlight when I start my walk.

A twisty as a headlamp. In a silicone bracket. Good luck adjusting and controlling it. 😂

Also, 3lm lowest level, no shortcuts, unknown LED. Nope.

Don't see it as a flashlight, more as a stylish fidget toy. 😉

No, that's the fake UltraFire. It's complicated...

For some reason I thought it came with a USB-rechargeable 14500

Some batches came with the USB rechargeable 14500, some did not.

Still not enough for calibration. This sensor is not able to give you CRI or correct duv values. It can estimate the CCT, though.