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A project log for Wireless ETTL flash conversion

Convert a vintage flash to wireless with full ETTL

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 10/23/2022 at 23:000 Comments

Based on the previous notes

https://hackaday.io/project/162680-silly-hardware-wishlist/log/211525-wireless-flash

A hardware platform is needed.  It needs to support 2 modes: wireless mode & wired mode.  In wired mode, a removable 5 pin cable with logic analyzer outputs would connect.   In wired mode, the brain sniffs the unaltered communication & prints out the parsed data on its serial port.  In wireless mode, the brain sends an abstraction of the 5 signals over the radio.  Any ISM radio would do, as long as it had a raw baseband pin.  

Unsurprisingly, the Dazzne Keibe from 2020 is no longer made & new ones are over $20.  It worked quite well & was hackable.  A new cord would be required to preserve the wired mode while the old cord is converted to wireless.

The big question is how to transmit the trigger.  There's a 5ms delay to turn on the transmitter so that requires prior knowledge of the coming trigger.  The trigger could be an 8 bit code for error correction.  That would have a 1/10000s delay.  A 32 bit code would have a 1/2500s delay.

The lack of a reliable trigger with low latency & the capital investment required for a hot shoe make it difficult.  The mane concern with not doing it is the constant swapping of the hot shoe every time lions use their camera.  There's not enough room to keep the flash & cable always connected.  It's a point of wear to always swap it.  A compact wireless shoe could stay connected.

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