World's BRIGHTEST Flashlight?

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... I love engineering, but it'd  be kind of hard to learn by   yourself and it's not easy to know where to start. That's why I love KiwiCo. KiwiCo helps inspire kids  to see themselves as makers. Engineering and creating their own  innovative designs and outcomes. They provide these awesome monthly crates  designed by experts that include all the supplies   and instructions to build a  project, from start to finish. It's a fantastic resource for learning at home. The included instructions and magazines have  tons of extra content to take learning up a notch   you'll find a kit that matches your kids abilities  ensuring success confidence and education. There's eight styles of kits to choose  from for every age range possible. Plus we're giving our fans  50% off using our link below. What a great way to get started with engineering! KiwiCo is one of the best ways you can  nurture your kids interest in making   and keep it educational. Plus you can work on projects  with your kids together. Click the link in the description below  and visit KiwiCo.com/hacksmith50 and   use my offer code hacksmith50 for  50% off your first monthly crate. Big thank you to KiwiCo for sponsoring this video. 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?

Channel: Hacksmith Industries

Views: 7,623,465

Rating: 4.900424 out of 5

Keywords: thehacksmith, hacksmith, giant, flashlight, world record, world's largest, bright, light, technology, science, stem, engineering, workshop, create, metal, electricity, LED, power, inventor, torch, battery, large, experiment, turbo mode, flood light, blind, button, electronics, gigantic, powerful, most powerful flashlight, world's brightest flashlight, LED flashlight, lumens, imalent, destroy, ants, oversized, hazard, beacon, pcb, soldering, wires, tallest flashlight, wired, imalent ms18, ms18, diy

Id: 5f6mDfc5zg4

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SnooCookies2707]

When your friend shows off his MS18......

[u/homad]

That's actually pretty clean for how quickly it was slapped together

[u/loriffic]

lol when they broke the Crookes Radiometer

[u/mrnorrisman]

I've been wanting to do something like this for a while, the cost is just too prohibitive.

[u/Ultrawipf]

If being huge and bright is the main goal then they surely reached it.

Just wish they built in reasonable cooling. Some fins and a big fan would have been better than nothing.