Emerald LED upgrade?

[Scud]

Hey all, I have a Warglaive with Emerald LED and Obsidian V3 that I love, but alot of these 12v and 12v+ blades are washing me out in pictures and video. I only use Heavy Grade Ultraedge blades... is there an upgrade I can get to make my system brighter off the same LI-ON setup without burning it out?

[Kouri]

You mind checking numbers on that? I'm really not sure who's making sabers with 12v battery packs.

That said, you're going to be a bit limited by either Emerald or the battery pack. The two 14500s you're using are going to limit output current to about 2000-2500mA. That's enough current for two parallel LEDs, or up to four LEDs if run in two sets of two serial.

First off, your challenge would be hunting down a brighter LED. Tri-Cree in Red, Green, and Royal Blue would fit the bill (avoid quad-Cree and quad-Rebel - the heatsink opening and optic angles make for a lighting solution that's not actually brighter than a good Tri-Cree setup.)

Once you've got your new LED setup, and everything's wired up to the Emerald Driver, your brightest blade is going to be something along the lines of R0, G100, B100. If you wanted silver clash, you'd probably punch in R100, G100, B100, but understand that current limitations would bring that down to about 70s-80s.

Alternatively, if you don't need to keep changing colors, and aren't overly-specific about shade, you could wire a couple colors in serial and bump up the current. I've been talking like 1000mA is the max current for any one color, but say you were after a nice aqua/cyan. You could wire Blue and Green in Serial, bump up the mA to 1200-1400, have a brighter blade, and still have 800-1100mA current available for a flash effect on top of the current color - so perhaps 1000mA of red for a cool-hued white.

A few other noteworty mentions: For a super bright green, a Tri-Cree Blue or Tri-Royal Cyan should produce a really bright green light when paired with a Photon Green blade.

Mid-grade blades will prove brighter than Heavy, if that's ever something you'd consider.

And finally, custom LEDs tied to a particular color might bump up brightness at the cost of flexibility. Rebel Lime Greens are stupidly bright at low power draw. Paired with an Amber or Red-Orange for a nice bright, energery efficient yellow blade. Pair with Cyan for a bright white.

All of this, though, pretty much depends on you being savy enough to solder your own components, or trusting enough to send the saber out to an unauthorized tech, since none of these options are really provided by US.

[Scud]

I... think I get what you mean. But I'm an idiot, I meant 12W sabers... I think mine is a 6 but I havent seen any specs anywhere.

[Kouri]

The issue is Wattage is just a measure of power consumption, not brightness, so it's not really a good measure for comparing LEDs. That said, I only know one builder that seriously advertises their 12W LEDs, and I think the issue is you're trying to compare your RGB saber to multi-die single-color LEDs.

For sake of comparison, let's say both your sabers are set to blue. Well, your RGBW has only one Blue LED to turn on. Your buddy's BBBB has four Blue LEDs to turn on. Guess which is brighter? Now say you want to switch to Green? Well you can, your saber has a Green LED to switch to. Cyan? Turn on both the Blue and Green. Your buddy is still stuck on Blue.

If you want to match your pals' sabers in brightness, you'd need to fully charge your batteries and set your Emerald Saber to a custom color with every LED on, which would probably appear close to white.

Long story short, you can have a super-duper bright saber, or a saber that can choose any color under the sun, but you can't have both. US now carries multi-die LEDs in Blue, Green, Red, and Orange, and Silver that have proven to be as bright or brighter than the other builder's sabers, but again, it's at the cost of color selection and flash-on-clash.

[Scud]

OOOOOH I get it now. Thank you! Maybe I will go all white with the 4th led then. I do love all the settings i can play with though with various colors. This is the explanation i was looking for.