idea: momentary brightness control

[unphased]

Hi, I am not sure if functionality like this has been implemented or planned, but from my quick review of the documentation I haven't found anything like this.

So I got my first anduril light and I love how much more flexible is than any other UI seen so far. But it leaves me wanting more.

in particular I would like to have the ability to customize brightness level once we have entered momentary mode. I really like the simplicity of momentary but (depending on the design/construction of the light) having to disassemble it before adjustments to setting can be made is not ideal. Under typical usage a flashlight (even a 14500 one) will last over a week before it has to be opened up for cell replacement. The most pressing desire is to be able to leave the light in momentary mode but allow a way either to exit momentary or to adjust set brightness without disassembling the light.

I probably don't need to go over why it's reasonable to have momentary be the default "base mode" of a flashlight. The main one is that for many high performance lights, regular run modes do tend to present a fire risk. I already burned a hole in my black fabric jeans pocket. For the moment I prefer to use lockout over momentary because of the level adjustability, but I find it suboptimal due to the cognitive requirement of managing the toggling of this state. Momentary is great because it provides the most direct control over output and generally ensures little fire risk (although not as safe as lockout).

So, the concept is either to extend the momentary mode with additional capabilities or to have a much larger change in behavior where momentary is more of a base state, the latter would be ideal for me but it's not likely to be possible without rather large code changes.

So let's consider what improved momentary may look like. First, I think there should be a separation between tactical momentary and EDC momentary. The former would definitely be used under tactical and other situations where it is important that no possible actuation pattern could cause a surprising behavior. On a light employed in a tactical scenario it's reasonable to expect the level will be consistent or managed ahead of time as well as maybe another channel is available to control it. OK, now for EDC momentary this is what I would want to put it into 90% of the time carrying the light.

• it will operate with momentary behavior
• important feature 1 is level adjustment. We may consider something like 3H and 4H to ramp up and down (following the configured smooth or stepped modality). Alternatively if that is too easy to accidentally trigger I'd consider the notion of establishing "codes" we can assign to these, you can think of it as having a pair of morse code patterns that end in a hold that you can program ahead of time to use as a signal for the light to enter level ramping.
• important feature 2 is a way to cause the light to stay on, just for this one time. Click once from here to go back. With this, it eliminates the main inconvenience of using momentary all the time which is sometimes we want light for an extended period and want to set it down, clip to a hat, or hold it in your mouth, to free up a hand to do something. In terms of implementation, clearly we can establish a third verb in addition to the above ramping commands to enter this state.

I think that about covers the scope of my concept. Preferably this behavior can be applied to the bonus modes (strobe/beacon/party/candle/lighting/bike) to add convenience to them.

I suppose I'd also mention that another direction to improve things could be adjustments to the lockout mode, this might have legs... lockout already implements easy to use moonlight and low capability so expanding lockout mode into something that allows level adjustment might be the best way to go about implementing this after all. And lockout already has "going into regular mode" implemented in the form of exiting lockout! Indeed I could be convinced that if lockout mode just gained one little thing (adding a 3H in lockout to obtain a momentary level of, say, half way between medium and high) I might even be completely satisfied....

[unphased]

Thought about it some more (if youre reading this whole thing thanks for being my rubber duck!) and I think i may have seen or read somewhere that levels in lockout mode may be configurable in memory, in which case that would get me most of the way to what I want. I can probably be ok with only having two momentary modes available from lockout (if i want turbo i'm fine with a 5H to get there! My current light (a FWAA) actually doesnt do 5H from lockout, it only gives 5C from lockout to turn on turbo, i'd love a 5H from lockout to get a one-time momentary turbo... so this would be an enhancement. I have no idea actually if my FWAA is running anduril 2 though. gotta read up more).

So... if i could configure lockout momentary levels for 1H to be momentary low or some kind of moonlight-low level, and 2H to be momentary medium, or maybe medium-high, then that's an improvement in usability at least for this particular light of mine

[unphased]

Aha ok so it turns out my FWAA is running anduril 2, so i'm able to do the 10C to set some kind of memorized brightness... this does work to assign the brightness to the 2H from lockout, which is extremely useful. It appears to be some kind of a "default brightness setting" that will, if set, override the default start brightness. perhaps not ideal since i would kinda like the regular on state to remember from last time... but this isn't all bad to be able to choose a good compromise mediumish level and be able to get that from 2H in lockout.