Muyshondt Web Log

Hello Everyone.

This is a topic that is somewhat controversial and generally a topic which I rarely engage in public discussion over. However, more and more I see people requested X feature from X product be copied into low-end manufacturer’s lines, be it from my products, or others still made largely here in the United States. While I understand the sentiment completely from a strictly consumerist perspective, there is another side to the story which is often unaccounted for. What follows is a general commentary on manufacturing, particularly the case of smaller manufacturers, and is not specific to me or anyone else.

I support American manufacturing. I make every effort with my products to have components that I have designed manufactured here in the United States. From my machined metal parts down to the printed circuit boards, every component that I designed gets sourced domestically, and assembly is done down here in Texas as well.

Why do I do this? The driving reason is Quality. I’ve worked hard with my suppliers to get them to understand the requirements for my products and get them to deliver it consistently without cutting corners or otherwise. American manufacturing, and for that matter, quality, unfortunately does not come cheap.

I also spend several months of my time researching, developing, and testing many different options in the designs of my products, and spend significant amounts of money in the process of bringing a new product to market. This is the nature of business, and this is also why the concept of intellectual property exists.

Innovation is something precious. Whether it be an ingeniously simple mechanical device or a complex electronic system using the latest breakthroughs in physics, he who goes through the trouble of bringing a product to bear deserves to benefit and receive the fruits of his labor. Accordingly, it’s bothersome to me to see someone write about how much they like something, and then proceed to entreat a low-end Asian manufacturer to copy a product’s feature, or the premise of the product in its entirety. It’s understandable to wish for less expensive products and to yearn for something that cannot be had. However, intellectual property, although not tangible in the physical world, is very much property nonetheless, and this copying of other another’s products is tantamount to theft.

This may or may not trouble people, and those with a purely free-market view of the world would point out that it’s simply the nature of business for comparative advantage in one area to benefit a more affluent region of the Earth. Fair enough, and fairly true. However, consider this:
For the innovator who has recently come up with something decent and of quality, if he has the rug pulled out from beneath him and fails to succeed with his invention because his work was copied and he was undercut by a competitor from the Far East, he may try again with something new once more, but if the process continues, he will eventually go and try to seek greener pastures.

This is a problem, twofold:
Firstly, the loss of quality manufacturing, and the increasing difficulty of finding good, reasonably priced reliable goods. This happened in the computer industry a few years ago with the advent of eMachines, which resulted in large price wars between the various PC manufacturers, and IBM (the originator of the personal computer) eventually bowing out of the market because few would purchase their higher quality, albeit more expensive machines. What was left behind in the aftermath was a smattering of manufacturers all producing lower grade stuff for low prices, but they are generally cheap and unreliable goods. A machine that is well made, reliable by nature, and of good quality now costs a small fortune to obtain from the select few quality manufacturers who were able to weather the storm and survive. This, as a consumer, is a problem for me, as I would much rather buy a product once and replace it at my leisure rather than having to now replace a product every few years because inherently unreliable and faulty design.

Secondly, the loss of innovators means the loss of innovation in general. If someone who spends their time and energy in developing something cannot receive sufficient benefit from their work, they will simply stop and move on to other things. What this means for the market of products in the long term is anyone’s guess; when the Eastern companies that are encouraged to copy the products of other companies stop having people to copy from, they will either have to begin to do actual legwork for themselves (which does happen and usually takes decades, take a look at the Chinese auto industry crash tests for their “innovative” lines of vehicles), or there will be a good long dry spell of very little substance and very little quality.

Moreover, if this continues in the long term, everyone is affected on an individual level. If one company stops providing domestic goods, all of their domestic suppliers have less business. On a small scale this isn’t a problem, but with time, eventually the effects trickle down, and as more and more places close up shop that are in the business of manufacturing goods, the more tangible the effects of such an event are; you might start knowing people affected by it who lost their jobs, or you yourself may be among them.

If you sell away the manufacturing base of your country, you sell away the soul of your country. If you are not producing goods for consumption and are letting other people do the work for you, and all that is left is the managerial and bureaucratic elements, you become unneeded by the companies doing the actual manufacturing, as they can get plenty of their own managers and bureaucrats for themselves, leaving the folks in the importing country in a rather serious hole.

I’ve seen encouragement of Far East firms by many people to clone features in my products, and features present in those products of my domestic colleagues as well, and while, once again, I understand such sentiments, there is only so long this can continue before the things to copy from this side of the pond become effectively non-existent. If you do not encourage and support those who bring the ideas to bear, and allow them to pick their fruits, I’m afraid the spoils left after their departure will be quite unpleasant in character and taste.

All this having been said, I bear no illusions about anything actually changing with any significant scale, and much of which has been discussed above is in most respects the nature of working in a worldwide, capitalistic system, which I do support. What I do hope to impart to the few who actually read what’s written here is an encouragement to support those who, wherever they may be, seek to bring new ideas for all to enjoy and not to cut their bottoms out from under them – I’ve seen these folks in Spain, in Germany, in South America, in Australia, the United States and in many other places across the globe. These are the people who deserve your support and your patronage.

Thank you very much for having taken the time to read this entry. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope that the comments I have written here have, at the very least, served as a little bit of food for thought.

-Enrique

A note to those of you who occasionally post here without registering:

Unfortunately, due to an increase in the volume and frequency of spam attacks I’ve been getting I’ve had to make the comments register only. I was getting roughly 40 e-mails a day for comment moderation and enough is enough. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s the only way to curtail the problems caused by spammers.

-Enrique

The below is a copy of a post I wrote a few months back regarding the use (or rather, the lack thereof) of rechargeable lithium ion cells in Muyshondt flashlights. The post was in an obscure thread and unlikely to be read by many people, and it bears repeating since the discussion of such still seems to come up every now and again.

-Enrique

The Aeon and Nautilus were designed around 3V cells, the standard lithium batteries available off the shelf that are used in cameras and various other electronic equipment. The rechargeable versions of these cells are not properly designed and have a far higher voltage than what they should given their intended application – this is not my fault, and not something that I can easily design around, nor do I have any interest in doing so.

The Aeon and Nautilus are equipped with a very efficient board optimized for running in boost mode off of primaries. Primary cells have a voltage of roughly 3 volts. If you get a rechargeable cell that is properly designed, the light works exactly as you would expect it to – the circuit doesn’t care what the source of the voltage is so long as it’s the right voltage.

The LEDs in my lights have a forward voltage of roughly 3.3 Volts. For a boost converter to function, it needs to be able to do just that, boost, which means that the voltage of the battery must be somewhere beneath that. Most rechargeable cells do not do not fit this requirement because of their poor design of being allowed to be overcharged up to 4.2 volts. Chances are high that if you actually tried to put some of these cells in a camera, which is what the cell size is/was primarily used for, particularly if the camera has multiple cells in series for power, that you’d blow the internal circuit.

Now, someone could counter the point above by saying “You could use a buck-boost converter instead”. Yes, I could, but there are very good reasons not to. The majority of buck-boost converter chips out there cut off regulation at somewhere within the two-point-something volt range – running off a 3 volt cell, your runtime would be significantly diminished compared to my current solution which sucks the cell nearly dry. So, while this may allow you to run badly manufactured cells in the light as well as primaries, you have some very serious drawbacks towards running in that configuration.

As for those who opt for programability of some kind, you’ll have to look elsewhere for that because you won’t see it from me. I like fully regulated lights, not LDO or PWM “regulation”, and I like simple off-low-high continuous switching and not repeated on-off cycles in order to get a flashlight to do what I want it to do. To me, for my uses, interfaces such as the FLuPIC, lights with “tactical strobe” and all these other options built into the light are feature bloat and hinder rather than help my use of the light in any conceivable situation I’m in. Of course, you’re mileage may vary in that regard, but lights that do this are outside of my design philosophy and I hope this explains a little bit as to why.

Now, to address the topic of the rechargeable cells proper. Standard rechargeable lithiums hate being overcharged. The also hate being overdischarged. They have a propensity to explode when mistreated. Unprotected cells are particularly suspect to this, and the protection circuit in protected lithiums isn’t designed or intended to be a multi-use device for repeated failsafes against overdischarging, and it is not something I would comfortably rely on for safety against an exploding cell. Moreover, just because the impact on an electric bill is small to recharge a cell, there is no such thing as “free lumens”. You may not be physically throwing a cell away into a landfill, but you are having some lumps of coal burned somewhere to provide the power to recharge your cell – either way something is happening that has its drawbacks, you cannot get a free lunch.

The converter in my lights will sucks the batteries nearly dry, and in the case of rechargeable cells, down to below their safe discharge threshold. This allows for maximal runtime using primary cells which the light is designed to work off of. I’ll reiterate again: for all the reasons above I do not recommend the use of rechargeable cells in my lights. Should you choose to use them despite this, any effects resulting from their use are entirely your own responsibility.

Every single design one chooses to make is a compromise between a wide variety of alternatives. I could make a light that does everything you could ever conceivably want it to do, but it would not be small, and it would not be cheap. My designs are done to try to achieve a nice (in my opinion) balance of size, output, runtime, and durability. I believe that the Nautilus and Aeon both do this well, and I can say that I’m genuinely pleased with the way they perform. Will they satisfy everyone’s wants or needs? Probably not. They will, however, provide a good amount of light when you need it, for a long time, in a minimally small and very durable package.

At the end of the day I suppose this post comes as a response to a theme that is somehow recurrent every few months about rechargeable batteries that never seems to be adequately addressed because it keeps coming up. Hopefully this will provide sufficient insight as to the hows and the whys about the operation of these lights to at last settle the discussion.

-Enrique
(By the way, the names of all the lights I’ve ever made are the CR2 Ion, Nautilus, and Aeon. Not the ION, and not the AEON – the names were not intended to be yelled when spoken. )

Just wanted to give everyone an update on the project. The design changes have been finalized, and here’s what I’ll be going with:

The light will now come equipped with a keyring, and still be able to tailstand, and the physical design of the exterior of the light has been changed to allow for a more secure hold all around while still keeping as clean of a design as possible. I don’t carry a AAA light on my keys (the Aeon is shorter and better suited for my pockets), but I know many of you do, and a keyring attachment point is useful to anchor to light to many other objects. Since it could be done without any major sacrifices in functionality (tailstanding in particular), I went ahead and added in the keyring cutout to increase the overall utility of the Mako.

I’d mentioned earlier that the head was easy to turn when wet or dry, and it is, but when greasy it becomes much more difficult, and I want the light to be able to function properly in every condition that it could conceivably used in, and an oily environment is certainly easy to come by. Form follows function, and I think in this case the two have coincided fairly well.

A set of fully functional prototypes in the new design will be making an appearance here in the coming weeks.

-Enrique