CA6 Update and the LED Flash

[Maurice]

Work on the CA6 has been going great.  I have been doing lots of testing, bug fixing, and optimizations.  At this point it's working really well for me.  There were a bunch of hardware changes I've been wanting to make over the past year since I did the last PCB and have just sent these boards off to be made.  Normally, I do the assembly myself on prototypes, but these are so complex I'm paying my normal assembler to do 5 prototypes.  Once I get these boards back I'm going to want a very small number of people to help me do testing on these boards.  If you are interested and think you'd be able to spend a lot of time with the these alpha CA6, and are willing to share detailed feedback with me then let me know.  https://www.dreamingrobots.com/pages/contact-us

The current plan is once I get this new hardware back and have verified everything works, I'll work on putting together the Kickstarter video.  Then I'll launch the Kickstarter.  In the Kickstarter I'll probably have a beta option where I'll let people pay more to get a beta version.  The point in this would be to get more testing done in a smaller group of people before releasing it to everyone.

In other cool news I plan to make a low cost (under $200) LED microsecond flash.  I've done some prototyping and have just finished designing a second PCB for this device that should let me test with a reasonable light output.  If anyone has some feature request for a really high speed flash let me know.

[Maurice]

There have been some delays with getting the latest CA6 PCBs back.  Hopefully I'll get them in month or so.  Nothing too bad, but not as fast as I was hoping.

The LED flash has been going pretty good.The second prototype of the LED flash is working good.  It does seem to generate enough light to be useful.  Next I plan to work on the optics.

[Ernie Hatt]

Ok Maurice I did say some time ago that I would be available to test things out, perhaps my lack of programming, would make that difficult, but the offer still stands. Ernie

[Maurice]

I remember that.  It's just I have a very limited number of CA6s right now and I'm trying to figure out how to get the most use of them.  At this stage making an CA6 costs a lot more than they will once I start making them in larger quantities.  At this point you are on my short list of candidates, but I can't say whether you'll get an alpha unit or not right now.

[Justin Benttinen]

Hi Maurice, I was hoping to buy one of your air-gap flashes a few years ago but couldn't because of the damn insurance. Since you're asking for feature requests for your flash, I would say that for my purposes the more power the merrier. I would love to test out one of them if you would be so kind as to allow me to. I would also gladly pay you some money up front if it helps develop the project. There is an art piece that I have been meaning to make for years that requires a high speed flash and I am excited to try it. I saw the Vela unit and it just seemed too underpowered for the amount of money that they are charging. Also, if you can give me an idea of what features you are already planning on I'd love to comment on what else you might want to add.

[Maurice]

Here are some of the features/limitations I'm planning to include:

1. Model light mode - The LEDs will blink for a microsecond every few milliseconds in a way that makes it appear to the human eye that the light is constantly on.  This isn't there to take pictures, but to help you setup the lighting for your shot.
2. I'm planning to expose a large range of duration.  Perhaps 1 to 128 microseconds.  The longer duration are really bright.  As a rough approximation 100 microseconds is about 128x (7 stops) brighter than 1 microsecond.
3. To keep the device simple and costs down you'll need to control settings with a CA6 or other microcontroller.  I will release code so you can use a cheap Arduino to control the settings.
4. Multiple exposures will be controlled by the triggering device.  The CA6 handles this well and I don't want to complicate the flash software.  What the flash software will do is limit how long or how many triggers can happen in a row to prevent damaging the LEDs.  Full details about the algorithm will be released once I've designed it so photographers will know what the flash allows.
5. There will probably be a temp prob to prevent overheating.  If it gets too hoot inside the case it will blink an indicator light at you and you'll have to wait for it to cool down.  This allows a lot more aggressive triggering algorithms.

I'm not ready for external testers on this flash yet, but feel free to ask again in a few months.  I might be ready then.