Good day! I need an LED strobe trigger for a Subal ND500 housing. The trigger, as far as I can tell from looking at the commercial photos ,
consists of a hot shoe plug, two coin batteries with holders, two pairs of wires and two 5 mm LED's. The price is about $300, which strikes
me as a bit high, given that the cost of the parts appears to be $10 to $15.
Do you know the circuit details, or know of somebody who has built their own LED trigger? If so, are the circuit and parts details available?
Thank you!
Just looking at the the D500, it has a PC flash sync terminal under the cover on top RHS facing the camera front. you could just buy a sync cord and strip the other end of it to connect up. This is straight old fashioned manual flash sync. A cord like this is what you need:
You would have to check for clearance for the cable plug, but the plug is pretty small.
10 hours ago, rwb500 said:
attached is my designspark mechanical file (free program) for my 3D printed hot shoe adapter. You can see the back piece pushes into the hot shoe, and has holes to run wires through to contact the center firing contact and the edge (ground/negative) contacts. The whole front of that is my design to hold a giant battery and the LED's mount above all of it. You'll just want to trim the hot shoe off of the rest of it.
you might be interested in my dyi tiny flash trigger, all open hardware. Granted, you have a skill to solder small SMD part I've successfully used that one with my Canon 5Dmk2 and optical INON strobes. The LED is driven outside its usual current (which is actually allowed for a brief period) to create a very short bright pulse enough to trigger the strobe.
A simple strobe LED trigger can be made from 3V coin batteries and a commercial red 630nm LEDs, a home built hot shoe plug w battery holder (1). This trigger has a red LED powered by two 3 V coin batteries in series to yeield 6V. The extra bright red 630 nm LEDs are Superbright LEDs (2).
No special trigger or switch is necessary as the camera’s hot shoe reliably triggers the LEDs. This circuit flashes my Inon Z330 strobes, but other strobes such as Sea&Sea may require brighter LEDs.
Notes:
The Subal LED trigger uses one 3V coin battery and a simple direct circuit with one small square 3 x 4 x 3 mm unlabelled ?capacitor in the circuit, with no other visible electronic parts. Super bright 5 mm red LEDs of varying brightness, 10,000 to 100,000 mcd, are available, as Chris notes, but Buyer Beware! as some dealers charge an exorbitant ($23) shipping fee.
- References:
1. https://wetpixel.com/forums/index.php?/topic/70122-diy-hot-shoe-plug-for-an-underwater-housing’s-camera/&tab=comments#comment-444162
2. Superbright LEDs.com (RLS-R8030), or from Ledsupply.com (L2-0-R5TH20)
39 minutes ago, Kraken de Mabini said:
The Subal LED trigger uses one 3V coin battery
Elias, the Subal V3 HSS board for Nikon uses 2x 1632 batteries.
Yes, the CR1632 battery you refer to is a coin battery and using two batteries in series doubles the voltage.
The issue with making them yourself is the alignment of the fibers to the optical port. If you look at the Nauticam triggers they are monolithic and designed to put the led output at the right place. I have the turtle trigger for my Isotta and the wires holding the led are always moving slightly every time I take the hot shoe off to change camera batteries and cards. You get used to fiddling with them before closing up the housing but they are definitely NOT plug and play like the Nauticam ones.
Bill
My Subal ND500 housing has no way to secure the strobe trigger LEDs to the housing's transparent strobe cable bulkheads, other than two small discs of glue tape included with the LED assembly, which barely secure the LED's to the bulkheads.
My solution is to secure the two trigger LEDs to the strobes fiber optic cable bulkheads with a plastic holder of ABS plastic, 6 mm thick, 50mm wide and 30mm high, with two 5 mm holes to hold the LEDs aligned with the transparent bulkheads, and two small holes for retaining screws.
Velcro tape secures the LEDs' electric cable to the housing.
I've successfully used that one with my Canon 5Dmk2 and optical INON strobes. The LED is driven outside its usual current (which is actually allowed for a brief period) to create a very short bright pulse enough to trigger the strobe.
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