Our own Matt Mets has a great project up where he makes homebrew camera flash triggers with xBee radios:
A year and a half ago, I started dabbling with using off-camera flash units, in order to exact better control over the lighting in my photographs. Of course, to do this, I had to invest in some equipment. I was able to pick up some used flashes for pretty cheap on Craigslist, however there were only two choices for wireless remote controls for them: Quality but expensive (Pocket Wizards), or cheap and questionable (Cactus triggers). Of course, I went for the cheap ones!
Well, I got what I payed for, and they stopped working after a few weeks. Rather than toss them, I had the bright idea of replacing their guts with some xBee transmitters. This actually worked pretty well, but I didn’t get around to documenting them until now. The idea is really simple- just configure the xBees in direct pin mode, and hook them up to the flash sync ports on the camera and flash. Using these transceivers, I am able to reliably pull 1/120th of a second sync speed (probably fine for studio, but not daylight), with an excellent range (something like 1/8th mile outdoors). Though they work fine, the construction quality is definitely questionable, so I’m kicking around designing new enclosures and having them printed.
6 thoughts on “Flash triggers with xBee radios”
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Using xbees in this situation seems a bit overkill… basic RF transceivers would probably work just fine, and cost much less.
Probably, but I had a pile of xBees on hand, and they have that really nice virtual pin mode that you can use to set up wireless links without a micro, and also have a fairly noise-immune protocol implemented :-). I’m open for other options though- know of any cheaper systems that could be used instead? Something with less latency would be great, but I really don’t want to implement my own coding scheme for transmitting to them.
You pointed out one with 1/250 sec syncing just a year ago… Did you forget already? ;)