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Elinchrom EL-Skyport triggered by Arduino

Wednesday, December 25. 2013

After figuring out how the Elinchrom EL-Skyport Transmitter works, I wanted to do a proof of concept implementation with an Arduino. This would allow me verifying my assumptions I made in my previous investigation. The hardware is based on an Arduino Leonardo equipped with a cheap (< 4 USD) nRF24L01+ module. After powering up the Arduino, it sends out a trigger pulse to the EL-Skyport Receiver every 500 ms.

Here is how it works.

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Posted by t0bY! in Basteln at 10:50 | Comments (4) | Trackback (1)

USB FLASH drive repair

Saturday, November 23. 2013

During the last years I repaired quite a lot of USB FLASH drives where the owners weren't able to read out the data anymore. Most of them were SanDisk Cruzer types. You can find a lot of complaints about failures online.

All of them had one thing in common: A hardware failure which was easy to repair.

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Posted by t0bY! in Basteln at 09:38 | Comments (41) | Trackback (1)

Elinchrom EL-Skyport Transmitter: Protocol and configuration

Thursday, July 11. 2013

Following my dissection of the EL-Skyport Transmitter and drawing its schematic, I have further analyzed how this remote flash trigger works. Since a Nordic nRF2402G is used for the transmitter's RF part, the datasheet was a good starting point. The PIC uses a SPI bus to control the RF IC. So I mainly wanted to find out:

How is the nRF2402 configured and when is the configuration done

Which data is send to the nRF2402 via SPI while in operation

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Posted by t0bY! in Basteln at 20:56 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Elinchrom EL-Skyport Transmitter: Opening, design, schematics

Monday, May 27. 2013

I got a new light meter (the Sekonic L758DR) which unfortunately can not trigger my Elinchrom studio flashes remotely. Hence I want to built my own trigger module to fit into the L758 RF module slot. In addition I am always curious about the inner guts of my gadgets. Unfortunately the Internet could not help me a lot with information about the Elinchrom Skyport system. So I needed to start my own research. I will post some more information on this system whilst my design work goes on. Today I'm gonna discuss the design of the EL-Skyport transmitter (SPTX-V1.1) as well as some internal key components. This could come in handy in case you have to repair a broken unit, when a switch breaks for e.g.

Elinchrom EL-Skyport Transmitter top

EL-Skyport Transmitter label

As you can see, my Skyport Transmitter SPTX has software version V1.1 flashed. Also clearly visible is the FCC ID. This always comes in handy to get first technical documents of electrical devices.

Continue reading "Elinchrom EL-Skyport Transmitter: Opening, design, schematics"

Posted by t0bY! in Basteln at 18:51 | Comments (12) | Trackback (1)