This is the Imalent MS18 the world's brightest flashlight that you can buy.
And this is our flashlight!
This video is sponsored by KiwiCo the fun and easiest way to learn
how to make projects at home by yourself.
A few weeks ago we had a major power outage. Lights were out for a while.
A long while and if you follow our Instagram which you should by the way
you might have seen a post of the entire team just sitting around in the dark.
What do people normally do when lights go out?
Light some candles and search for their flashlight, but uh we couldn't find ours.
So we set out to make sure that never happens again and to do that we brought in Chris.
Chris is an expert in all things LED and light optics.
Chris how many LED's are in the world's brightest flashlight?
Uuuuh about 18.
And how many LED's does Digi-Key have in stock?
Uh 300.
Let's do that!
This is the Imalent MS18.
It is currently the world's brightest flashlight.
It's so bright and so hot that you can only keep it on its brightest setting for so long.
It's actually too hot to handle,
much like myself.
The best part about it it's available on Amazon for only $800.
The source of all this crazy power
is the 18 Cree LED's that provide this flashlight with 100,000 lumen output.
18 is a good start but to make our flashlight I've gone ahead and ordered 300 of these suckers.
Just for reference this is the current amount of LED's in the
world's most powerful flashlight and this is the number of LED's in our flashlight.
300 LED's means I'm gonna need to design a custom PCB
to hold the diodes, power them, as well as get rid of any excess heat.
Let's hop into Altium Designer the industry standard for PCB design.
You can download Altium Designer and try it for free at Altium.com/yt/thehacksmith
You can view these custom PCBs on Altium Viewer.
So I have 300 LED's total and I can fit about 6 LED's per board so that means I need um...
James just ordered 50 PCBs.
50?
Yep.
How am I going to get power to the 50 boards that I just bought?
Well LED's are constant current devices, meaning the voltage can vary across them the
longer the LED's stay connected to a depleting battery source the dimmer they're gonna get.
So how do we fix this problem?
Well in between the battery and the LED's we put a constant current LED driver.
Imagine a lemon
when the battery is full we only have to squeeze it a little bit to get some juice out of it.
So as the battery begins to drain we need to squeeze it
even harder to get the same amount of juice out.
So in this example my hand was the constant current led driver.
It applied varying pressure to get the same amount of juice out.
You know what they say when life gives you lemons make the world's most powerful flashlight.
To sum it up,
we have 300 LED's.
They are split between 50 boards, those 50 boards go to 50 constant current drivers,
those 50 drivers they are all powered by one battery.
Makes sense? Good.
I bought a bunch of lemons!
What?
Don't worry about it...
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When you add 300 LED's in a tight space things are going to get hot fast and that's a problem.
Traditionally we just buy a heatsink but everything we looked at online was just too small.
So we're gonna have to build our own.
We're gonna take this and make it into that.
Now that the heatsink is done, I guess I should put all these led PCBs together eh?
Awesome these look good.
I just have to do this 49 more times.
I think I'm gonna need some help.
Good thing we have interns.
This is Jimmy he's an expert in all things i don't want to do.
What?
Boards are done.
We've got all 50.
Let's put them on the heatsink
I just have to do this 49 more times.
Let's wire it up!
As you can see this is a lot of wires.
Jimmy why don't you walk us through what we're looking at here.
I don't know man.
Ah Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy.
All right I'll do it myself.
A giant flashlight needs a giant switch.
Let's go ahead and turn it on.
You know what goes great with a giant switch?
A giant button.
Our flashlight is going to have three different modes.
Low, high and turbo.
That's all going to be controlled by this little button right here.
This is our control board PCB.
Up here we have our voltage regulation into the board.
Then we move down over here to our button inputs.
Moving down we have three more relays that control the low, high and turbo mode for the LED itself.
So look at all these wires!
From the three relays, we have three bundles of wires.
Those bundles of wires provide power to the LED drivers which
in turn provide power to the LED's themselves.
Finally!
All those buttons all those switches all those screens all those LED drivers come into this.
This LED monstrosity!
I guess all systems are go. Let's test it out.
If you're interested on how this works check out the circuit diagram on maker.io.
To commemorate this glorious event
Jimmy and myself have put on GoPros to capture all of the action!
Hi Jimmy. Hi Chris,
but first safety!
This is gonna take a while.
With that I think we're ready.
This little light of mine.
I'm gonna let it shine.
Jimmy?
Yes Chris?
Why isn't the flashlight working?
I don't know. Did you plug in the batteries?
Jimmy this isn't amateur hour Jimmy.
Did you check everything?
I checked every single one of them.
Did you check the LED's. Yes.
The drivers? Yes.
You check the fuses? Absolutely.
Wait...
Oh Jimmy. You wanted me to check the fuses?!
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, Jim, Jim, Jimmy.
That was your responsibility!
All right all right okay.
Jimmy turn the light on I can't see a thing.
Turn on the light?
So uh that actually worked really well but as you can see light just kind of went everywhere
and traditionally speaking flashlights have a much more focused beam,
so let's see what we can do about that.
You might have seen grandma or grandpa using one of these things.
It's called a fresnel reading magnifier.
It allows you to focus on a certain area of text kind of like a magnifying glass.
If we take a light source and apply it to the other side of
the lens we can actually focus light into a point.
You know kind of like that kid at recess who used to burn ants.
We can take this principle and apply to our flashlight.
We're gonna need something a little bigger.
Oh my god well the bag's on fire!
Man that is some black smoke.
Oh the golf ball's on fire, really on fire.
Hot? That's actually hot.
Now that we have our big lens we need to ensure that all of the light from here
makes its way into here.
We can start off by actually getting a smaller lens and putting them on each of these individual
LED's to ensure the light is as collimated as possible going into the bigger lens over there.
But what about this gap?
In between we're gonna need a way to actually keep the light in a tunnel.
So I've gone ahead and sourced a fancy reflector
also known as a common trash can, to go in between.
Let's just get rid of this though.
We're gonna saw the bottom off
and coat the entire inside with this reflective material to make sure it doesn't catch fire.
What about all these electronics? Where are they gonna go and how are we gonna hold it?
Well I've gone ahead and sourced something that I think we can fit everything into.
So now all that's left is to put it together and give it a coat of paint.
James.
One golf ball, one garbage can, and one pair of oven mitts.
I thought you're building a flashlight?
Oh I am.
The giant LED array has been mounted to this concrete footing.
I've taken all the wires and pulled them through so you can see them right here.
A little bit of a mass but piece by piece it's coming together.
This is like the last 5% so let's say 95% done.
This is gonna work.
Look at that.
It's a flashlight it's got to be clean you know.
Also this was the garbage can so there's that.
Jimmy I need you to go dry the garbage can. Right now?
Yeah like right now.
Is it dry yet Jimmy?
Oh VHB I'm gonna use it all. Don't tell Dave.
Woah woah woah
it's a flashlight not a battering ram!
Come on man it's a Hacksmith video that's what I do.
Alright this flashlight looks incredible!
Chris did a fantastic job but how does it stack up to the competition?
Let's find out. Lights!
So over here we got your standard rinky dink over the counter flashlight.
Let's see how it does!
Not not great.
Alright let's try the Imalent MS18.
This is the world's brightest production flashlight available.
Pretty bright.
That's this is pretty bright.
Well there goes the fan.
I think we can do better though.
Three! Two! One! GAAH
You can't see the sign LED's anymore! Oh god.
Lights!
Alright so that certainly looks impressive but
maybe we could measure the light output in a more scientific way.
This is called a Crooks Radiometer and it actually measures light radiation.
Let's see what happens when we put this in front of each flashlight.
Alright starting with the rinky dink flashlight let's see what happens.
Oh, it's moving.
Oh yeah it is.
One rotation every hour.
Well maybe not that slow.
Let's try bringing it a little bit closer.
There we go! Solar power right there.
Slowly spinning.
Alright let's see what the Imalent MS18 can do.
Alright the world's brightest flashlight.
Let's see what happens.
Oh oh it's spinning oh man it's been real fast.
Let's try our flashlight!
I can't, I can't see anything. My eyes.
Alright we've only got seven seconds before this baby overheats. Let's do it!
One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven!
Oh look how fast
it's spinning.
Holy! Woah!
How did light fold something?
What have we done? What have we created?
Look at that!
Alright that was pretty impressive but we need to give this bad boy some room to breathe.
You know how big a football field is right?
Let's start with the rinky dink flashlight.
Not very good.
Is it on? Yeah! I can barely see it.
Alright let's try the Imalent MS18 the world's price flashlight.
That's pretty bright but let's see how ours does.
Remember grandma and grandpa's reading lens from before? Well here it is now!
Let's see what happens!
Oh god.
What do you think? High beams? High beams.
Alright I think we've made the world's brightest flashlight and like a true
Hacksmith project this thing almost weighs as much as Stormbreaker so good job making it so heavy.
That is a requirement for our projects.
Great work Chris.
Yeah thanks, well it was really fun.
Remember to like comment and subscribe.
Pew Pew.
Pew Pew? Do we do that now?