Here's the rest of the pictures of the overhead lamp showing a little more detail of the gut job I did on the lamp assembly.

This is a picture of the top side showing the LEDs mounted directly to the sheet metal. This is now the bottom of the fixture.



The following picture shows the simple Xitanium 350mA driver module and it's associated wiring. Inside the fixture all the lamp ballast, starters, end tube connections have been removed leaving an empty shell. I drilled two holes and re-used the sheet metal screws to hold the Xitanium driver and enlarged 4 side holes near the ends to allow passage of the chain to hang the light fixture. Other than the four holes no other modifications were made.


I also used a 3 foot extension cord for the main power and a heavy duty inline switch to allow turning the light on and off.

I've not posted for a few days. Took the weekend off and rested some. I'm now scrambling to order parts for a run of many many boards for their product. At first in was only one converter board and I'm working with my local CM to have the board made here locally and then sent overseas for final assembly. Now we have a daughter board that has a Attiny25 on it to monitor the battery voltage and then strobe the converter board to blink the light when it determines the battery voltage is getting low giving a visual indicator to the end user that the battery needs to be re-charged before it dies altogether.

I'm also doing raw research on new materials and optical material and I've been sending emails and calling people on the phone all day now for the last couple of days gathering info and educating myself on some terminology and technology.

I have revision 2 of the Remora board and I verified there are no missing connections on this board and I have loaded the components on it. Everything goes on ok and now the microprocessor fits correctly.

Upcoming changes to the Shark. C5 will be increased to 1uF to increase the softstart time to eliminate the initial power on flash that occurs. R4 wil most likely be 4.98K rasing the voltage limit to 26V and change C4 to a higher voltage capacitor. I will roll the Remora once more the add the two components that are required on the Shark board replacing the trim pot and move them to the Remora board. Then, the only mod to the Shark will be to remove the trim pot and short the upper two pads. Bolt on the Remora board and away she goes...

Another batch of Sharks is on the line at the CM, but, we have it on hold pending these final changes. There will not be any changes to the raw fab, only component value changes. These will look identical to the current revision. I will have to mark them somehow to denote the difference.

The low cost driver board is up and running and I've trimmed the flatness to be semi-flat allowing it to have less output with less battery voltage. It only drops 25% from 3V to 2V and this is barely noticeable when I yank the power supply knob back and forth swinging the input from 2V to 3V. I think that's a good compromise to being fully regulated. It's still cranking over 150mA at 1V. Pretty Awesome.

Once I solder on the silver rings on the Cree LEs they will go into completed lights and completed LEs for sale on the shoppe. I give the inventory to Cindy to manage and sometimes it takes a while for her to get it queued up and actually enabled on the shoppe. So, when I say I'm putting something online I mean I'm giving it to Cindy and she will at some point in the future put them online.