Flashlight Specification Tool (Very Cool!)

I found a website that allows you to search for flashlights across every imaginable variant.

http://flashlights.parametrek.com/index.html

It's fun just changing specifications to search for and see what comes up.

Its interesting, but soooo many brands are missing. If its updated however to include more brands, stores etc, it would be pretty nice.

I like the idea.

They only have ~ 9 brands in the system though, but, still, its a cool idea.

If you click "Brands"

It does have a part where it asks if you want to see them add a brand....so go there and ask them to add some specific brands.

You can also add other criteria, such as if it can tailstand, is regulated, and so forth.

There is a recommendation section. I have already requested several brands, including Zebralight.

Hey, creator of Parametrek here. Glad you guys are liking it! Not to highjack the thread, but I'll answer any questions you all have.

Claimed 575 lm/W efficiency for the Coast HL8... :laughing:

Neat comparison tool, thanks for the heads-up!

Edit: Dig at Coast's claimed runtimes, not your site!

Coast always has flawless math. Six 100lm/w efficiency LEDs = ~600 lumens per watt. Right?

parametrek said:

Hey, creator of Parametrek here. Glad you guys are liking it! Not to highjack the thread, but I'll answer any questions you all have.

Click to expand...

Just curious, how did you know this site was looking at your page?

Thanks for making it!

Yeah, the lum/watt numbers are all over the map. They are calculated by (lumens * hours) / (Wh battery capacity). Works great when the flashlight uses a constant-brightness regulator and the battery type is known. For unregulated lights it might overestimate by a factor of three to six. A unfortunate artifact of how the ANSI FL1 testing is done.

Has Selfbuilt done any nice runtime graphs for cheap unregulated flashlights? Should be possible to calibrate the efficiency numbers then.

Edit: I can't seem to find any unregulated lights tested by Selfbuilt. However, http://flashlightreviews.com has a bunch. Looks like direct drive (resistor) overestimates by around 4x and unregulated boost (Joule Thief circuits) overestimates by 2x on alkaline batteries.

Erik1213 said:

Just curious, how did you know this site was looking at your page?

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HTTP Referers. Whenever you click on a link, the browser asks a server for the webpage at the URL you clicked. Most browsers will also tell the server what page you were looking at when you clicked the link. It is not very useful, except when you suddenly get a 4x increase in traffic and want to know why

Added Zebralight to the index.

I'd like to request that this thread be made sticky.

parametrek said:

Hey, creator of Parametrek here. Glad you guys are liking it! Not to highjack the thread, but I'll answer any questions you all have.

Click to expand...

There is something fishy about the filters, I get a Mini MA-AD by Foursevens in the resulting list when I select Fenix and 1xAA.

Update: The filtering seems to work just fine after a page refresh. If I play with the filters a lot (select 1xAA, deselect 1xAA, select 1x18650, and so on), I get strange results (like no E35 found for Fenix + 1x18650).

alexandrul said:

There is something fishy about the filters, I get a Mini MA-AD by Foursevens in the resulting list when I select Fenix and 1xAA.

Update: The filtering seems to work just fine after a page refresh. If I play with the filters a lot (select 1xAA, deselect 1xAA, select 1x18650, and so on), I get strange results (like no E35 found for Fenix + 1x18650).

Click to expand...

I thought it was just me being clueless. a refresh did It

alexandrul, might I ask the browser and version you are seeing this with? I won't say the system is perfect (try clicking on all the sorting buttons really fast) but those basic filters should be watertight. My first guess would be an accidental hidden filter that is blocking the E35 from the results.

Firefox 21 beta. In this video you can see the page behavior on my PC: at the 3rd try (starting at 1:40) I was able to replicate the missing E35 from the results of Fenix + 1x18650 filters. In almost all cases, there is a mismatch between the result count and the list of results.

Huh. Okay, that is pretty bad Thank you for recording the video, it clarifies things immensely. It is also odd that the browser never loads the pictures.

I do not know what to say other than it works in FF19, all the webkits (from android to safari), IE10 and Chrome. I'd really need to sit down with Firebug on a computer with the problem to get to the bottom of it. To that end, it looks like you are on Windows. It should not matter (but just in case) which version of windows? And 32 bit or 64 bit? And we are taking about the latest FF beta binaries, 21.0b3?

Taking a single random shot into the dark, I'm guessing the problem might be related to some junk that was added for IE8 compatibility. It's been cut out. Does it act any better after a page reload?

Windows 7 x64, latest beta, the site works ok with all add-ons disabled. However, I can't surf with all add-ons disabled, so I did try to whitelist your site in every extension I could think of, and it's still not working after many selections. However, the issue is my browser, so it's my problem.

OTOH, very nice site

alexandrul, good news. It looks like this was fixed in FF 20 beta 4.

parametrek said:

alexandrul, good news. It looks like this was fixed in FF 20 beta 4.

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Indeed, it's much better now (not perfect, I can still replicate the issue in 4-5 attempts with the add-ons enabled and the site whitelisted, but is a huge improvement over the last beta build). Thank you for the good news

As a side note, could you add a PWM yes/no/unknown property?