Project ideas needed for hacking a generator flashlight.

Bean

I got this generator LED flashlight from QVC called "The Illuminator", it costs about $20 and it has 3 white LED's and a 3.6volt 35mAHour Li-on rechargeable battery.

There has got to be some kind of cool project to make out of this thing (using a stamp or SX of course).

Any ideas ???

http://www.mfagifts.com/proddet.asp?id=85

Bean.

Post Edited (Bean) : 11/16/2004 3:46:50 PM GMT

Bean

I guess it will have to be an SX project, I don't think the stamps can run from 3.6Volts ?

Bean.

Dave Paton

I'd grab one of the inexpensive voltage doubler ICs (or build one from one of the switched capacitor building blocks that are available from Linear). A flyback converter would work too. There are lots of cool chips for generating alternating voltages out of 1-cell Li-Ion packs. National has some, Micrel, Linear, and maybe TI?

-dave

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pjv

Hi Bean;

Since the light source is LED in nature, one would expect them to be able to turn on and off rather quickly, possibly as fast as 10,000 or even 100,000 pulses per second. So why not program up an SX running at the 3.6 volts, and turn it into a variable speed stroboscope.

An up and down button would increase or decrease the flashing speed from a start-up default.

If you needed it, you could even add a several digit LED display to show the flash rate. If a display is mechanically or cost-wise not desirable, you could, with another button, cause the leds themselves to (slowly) flash out in code the generated speed·of hundreds or thousands of pulses per second.

If you got fancier, you could add a (fast = pin) photo sensor circuit and then slowly auto-sweep the flashing speed (probably downward to aid in preventing aliasing) and let it find the rotational speed of some item.

Could be a lot of fun, and without display, should be possible with an SX running on internal 4 Mhz, two or three pushbuttons, three resistors and a 0.1 UF capacitor. Use one resistor/cap combination to make a DAC which in turn, with some clever software, auto biases the photosensor at the CMOS threshold, making the device very sensitive, and with even more clever software, self adjusting to ambient light.

Have fun,

Peter
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Bean

Hey I like that idea, in fact the SX even has a comparitor built in for the photosensor threshold.

The flashlight is pretty bright and would do a good job as a stroboscope.

As it is it has one switch on it that cycles between off-1led-off-3leds and it's NOT momentary so I will have to figure some way of adding switches ???

My other thought was some kind of commuication device. Maybe a morse-code sender ? Would be useful in an emergency because of the generator. Changing the switch function to off-3leds-off-SOS ?

Bean.

pjv

Hi Bean,

And of course you could make it a multi-function device; as you said, morse code sender etc. by pressing the push button(s) in some timed-code fasion to select the various modes.

Peter