First post

Welcome to the 2nd most boring blog ever! I'm using this blog to record some of the things I am working on at the moment. For the first while it will probably concentrate on some experiments I have been doing with an old Nikon SB-25 speedlight I bought on ebay a few weeks ago. I had the idea that it might be possible to make a controller for Nikon's old speedlights that would make them compatible with the wireless CLS protocol, or at least partly compatible. For example with CLS you can use the camera (e.g. a Nikon D300) to remotely control CLS compatible flashes, such as the SB-600 and SB-800. One of the simplest things you can do is to fire them remotely and set the power of the strobes from the camera or from an external CLS controller (SB-800 or SU-800). At a more advanced level you can do i-TTL metering wirelessly and invoke the model light. It should be possible to do something similar with Nikon's older TTL compatible strobes with an appropriate controller. For example, the controller could monitor the signals (flash or IR pulses) generated by the commander, decode them and fire the connected flash generating an appropriate light pulse.

Producing such a controller will be a long term project that will require learning a lot about strobes and the Nikon CLS system. Also my electronics knowledge is quite rusty,since I have not done anything serious in many years. To start with I decided to produce a circuit that will generate a flash pulse of a fixed duration in time using a TTL compatible flash (my SB-25). Specifically it will trigger the flash then quench it at a fixed time later. The time delay should be generated digitally, so that it is accurate and repeatable. The delay must range from 10's of microseconds to 10's of milliseconds. My next post will describe the circuit to do this.

Thanks for reading the first post on the second most boring blog ever!