Has anyone thought of the idea, since most of the cameras being catered to by CHDK have no built-in "hot shoes" nor "PC flash port connections" to control an external flash..is there a way to make a connection with the usb port (with CHDK programming of course) to trigger an external flash? Buying a slave controlled flash unit has been the easiest solution for this. The problem with this though is we need a digital slave unit for ones with pre-flashes or red-eye reduction or if we are in a crowd with other cameras and flashes is our slave controlled external flash would also be abnormally triggered by the burst of other flash units in the area. So,I was thinking of a hot shoe connected and controlled by the usb port of the compact cameras? Has anyone thought of this before?
- This is a great suggestion and I don't see why it can't, in theory, be done. Since the USB remote cable feature can read the USB port, it should be fairly simple to change one of the signal lines with a new script command. I'd suggest directly asking Ewavr, Fingalos, or Microfunguy. (Ewavr would be my first choice, since he probably played with that port the most working out the USB remote stuff, but the other two aren't shabby programers either.) Getting the USB port to signal the outside world to do something would be the easy part. The trickier part would be designing a way to control the remote with that signal. that part would depend on the what the remote flash unit has in the way of trigger options. For slave units that fire on the flash of the main, an LED at the end of the cable which is taped over the light sensor might work (so the unit will only see the LED light).
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A friend of me has built a "remoteflash cable" by plugging a tiny light sensor on the flash of the cam. by using the original flash, the slaveflash is activated due to the elecrtic signal