LED strobe trigger not enough power

Building my first rig with a Sony a6500 in a Fantasea housing. Got myself a DS-Y2 and the LED flash trigger by Fantasea. Well, apparently the optical trigger on the YS-D2 is too weak to fire from the LED trigger.

Im looking for a workaround and/or suggestion.

Suggestions needed also include a list of professional quality strobes that do work via LED strobe trigger.

Thanks

Hi Matt,
try a Inon Type4 D2000 or Z240.
They are easier to ignite....

Had troubles with ignition from my Hugyfot housing, with all brands, but the Inons were the best.
Now i get new acrylic windows, we will see.

What fibre cable are you using?
The new Sea&Sea seems good.

Regards,
Wolfgang

Which fiber optic cable are you using? It makes a big difference. Try the Nauticam fibers or the S&S multi-fibers or make your own double fibers for cheap and see if that helps.

Does the LED trigger fire the strobe if you hold the LED up to the fiber port on the strobe directly?

Cheers

Bill

Which fiber optic cable are you using? It makes a big difference. Try the Nauticam fibers or the S&S multi-fibers or make your own double fibers for cheap and see if that helps.

Does the LED trigger fire the strobe if you hold the LED up to the fiber port on the strobe directly?

Cheers

Bill

I have a Sea&Sea FO. I did read that prior to the Nauticam FO cable their LED trigger wasn't firing the YS-D2. If I put the LED directly into the strobe it DOES fire.

Fantasea has responded to me that the YS-D1 and YS-D2 are currently not compatible yet that information lives no where else on the internet.

The INON Z-240 has a very sensitive trigger, there seems to be a few of them popping up in the classifieds, possibly due to the new model strobes coming out.

Building my first rig with a Sony a6500 in a Fantasea housing. Got myself a DS-Y2 and the LED flash trigger by Fantasea. Well, apparently the optical trigger on the YS-D2 is too weak to fire from the LED trigger.

 

Im looking for a workaround and/or suggestion.

 

Suggestions needed also include a list of professional quality strobes that do work via LED strobe trigger.

Thanks

Hi. The D2 has a little poor sensor what is calibrated for internal flash. When we developed the TURTLE we pushed lot of energy how we find the correct LED and drive to got maximum power for the D2!

If you have chance to change your strobe my opinion you can find used INON Z240 in the market wich has very sensitive optical sensor.

Before you buy a new strobe try it with a nauticam multi-strand FO cable. This has solved numerous issues. Or alternatively use the double inon bushings and run two fibers from the strobe to the housing.

Bill

Late to the discussion....

I understand you are using a Sea&Sea fiberoptic cable. Point in fact I have come across instances of their cables which have significantly lower transmissivity thus limiting the amount of light transmitted to the strobe. In fact by simply holding one end of the fiber up to a light (e.g. table lamp) and looking at the opposite end, you may very see that less than 100% of the fiber is illuminated.

In my case I was forced to swap out the dim fiber.

The above occurred when I was developing the fiber optic trigger for the Olympus E-M1 mk II, in conjunction with the YS-D1 and YS-D2.

I've found UW specific fiber cables quite thin and flimsy (and expensive!) so I've taken to making my own out of 3mm end glow cable, mounting it into the plug ends from a failed cable. There was a recent thread about this exact issue with S&S strobes & led triggers with a video someone posted making it work with a custom cable like mine.

Fiber cable is super cheap. Cut, flame polish the end, mount into the plug and you're good to go. Someone else suggested dipping in boiling water & wrapping around a rod to create a coil in the cable. Plan to try that.

We can offer to you the new TURTLE what is working with 100 candela smd power LED. We tested S&S D1, D2 Inon Z240,Z330 and Subtronic flashes with optical cables.

Hi,
i have tested a lot of cables and strobes.
The best fibre cable i had tried, and one in use now, is the new Sea & Sea with the black plugs....
With that i can ignite the D2 via the turtle and ist a pitty i didnt got a second one before the trip.
Now i use a lang "weaker" fibre cable to connect the second D2 from the first one...
Have got a UW technics board as well for the trip, that will be tested next days.

Back home in 2 weeks, i will try to write some words about the testing and results.

Regards,
Wolfgang

That was my findings as well.

That said on the subject of LED triggers, if you need a means to couple the camera to the strobe then a TTL LED scheme might as well be the solution.

On the other hand if one is replacing an on camera strobe with LED, in many cases the result might be worth the cost. With an Olympus the recycle time is 3 seconds. The YS-D2 recycle time is 1.5 seconds, max. Is 1.5 seconds worth it? In practice I certainly have found cases where I screwed up and needed to shoot again immediately. Sometime 1.5 seconds made the shot and in many cases not so much. And with respect to power savings on the camera's primary battery, for the M-1 mk II, it doesn't matter given a battery lasts two dives of 100+ minutes with a lot of reserve left. This from someone who spent a lot of time making an LED solution work on the mk II a year ago and used the result during a lot of diving in 2016.

The best fibre cable i had tried, and one in use now, is the new Sea & Sea with the black plugs....

Diego:
I think there are two issues. One is that if you are trying to get Olympus TTL from an LED that will I think be very difficult. 2 mm single core fiber most likely will have a very low NA so that might not work well. For less than 20 euro you can test out using a double fiber setup using the Inon Bushings and some 1 mm single core fiber (I can send you a double fiber cable if you want). The multicore fiber is about 6 euro per meter. No one you dive with has some good fibers?

Bill

Perhaps you looked at my thread with respect building a LED trigger out of an Olympus strobe. That said I'm rather sure that I didn't discuss LED choices, but I found that the Sea&Sea strobe is more sensitive to a red LED than white. Also you need everything working in your favor such as good LED / fiber alignment such that you don't waste energy. Also the transmissivity of the fiber is critical, where defective fiber clearly became a limiting factor.

I might not have discussed the drive on the LED needs to be quite large, which is acceptable given it is running in a pulse mode. This to get as much light out as possible.

Finally a higher output LED is nominally a smaller field of regard, which makes alignment all the more critical. But this way you get more light down the fiber than if the lens on the LED presents a wider beam.

Sorry for the rambling but I'm off doing something else at the moment...

 

Hi All,

I'm facing up the same problem. Olympus M5 in a Nauticam housing and two YS-D2, everything works well in DS-TTL with standard fibers and the original Olympus strobe. I made a LED TTL trigger based on a used Olympus strobe and I cannot trigger the strobes. If I fire directly in the YS sensor, it works well, so it is not a problem of the trigger itself. I used 2 white LEDs supposedly of 18000mcd and narrow illumination angle, I now ordered 2 red LEDs of rated 40000mcd...will see.

Tried standard fiber (the one working with the standard strobe) and one custom 2mm single core fiber, but no way to trigger the strobes.

I'm looking for a solution, which will not imply changing the strobes.

I would be willing to invest on Sea&Sea or Nauticam fibers, but I would need to try them and the closest seller to me is at 300km.

Any other idea?

Cheers,

Diego

 

Cheers,

Diego

We've been dealing with this issue for a while.

We've found the new S&S cables to be the thickest and carry the most light. Better than Nauticam. We've had no issues at all with YS-D1 strobes and triggers. When S&S came out with the YS-D2 they "dumbed" down the sensitivity of the trigger on the strobe to try to improve TTL. Most triggers (as opposed to boards) do not do TTL, only manual. But more and more new ones are coming out that do work in TTL and they do work better with the red LEDs.

Recently we've been testing the latest rev of the YS-D2J strobes (yellow label). We are finding that they are working fine with most triggers. While S&S isn't saying they changed it, it seems like there has been an improvement in this area. We are also seeing pretty much a zero failure rate for these "new" strobes now being made back in Japan at SunPack. All of their strobes like the YS-03 and YS-01 are now also being made back in Japan.

Great... I'm stuck with a pair of made in China Sea&Sea strobes...

Recently we've been testing the latest rev of the YS-D2J strobes (yellow label). We are finding that they are working fine with most triggers. While S&S isn't saying they changed it, it seems like there has been an improvement in this area. We are also seeing pretty much a zero failure rate for these "new" strobes now being made back in Japan at SunPack. All of their strobes like the YS-03 and YS-01 are now also being made back in Japan.

Back to the original question. Point in fact I never got a white LED to work with the YS-D2. In fact I tests a range of different color LEDs settling on red. While I only had Sea&Sea fibers to work with one fiber simply put transmitted far less light, where I couldn't get reliable operation. If I had known at the time I purchased it, it was have gone back for a replacement. That said so much light is coming out of the Xeon strobe that I never noticed the issue until moving to an LED design. My guess is that if you use a similar LED to what I picked and Sea&Sea fiber, the trigger will start working.

Sorry for bringing this up very late, but my Fantasea LED trigger does fire my Sea and Sea YS-D2J's however wouldn't work with any of the shop bought standard fibre optic cables for UWP.

I ended up using flexible 3.5mm side glow fibre cable, encased in a black hose and wrap it close to my strobe arms, there is more than enough light produced to light the sensors in the YS-D2j's... If you don't wrap the FO cables in black hosing then bright sunlight can trigger the strobes by hitting the FO cables.

My problem is I have made one pair of these cables but when I reordered the cable to create spare cables I get a different ones, either non-flexible or with an external skin making it too wide.  To make they cost around £10 ($13) to make 2 including connectors at each end, no skills needed other than to be able to measure and use a sharp knife.

As said the LED's put out enough light the problem is the amount transmitted by the commercial FO cables.