3.5mm minijack sync port mod. Just because.

[inkista]

I have added 3.5mm minijack sync ports to both my YN-560 and my 580EX. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The YN-560's warranty was only for 90 days (probably how CheapLights keeps them so cheap), and I was only a week away, and the 580EX is probably three years out of warranty, now.



The wild hair first came to me years ago when I got my 580EX (mark I) and started reading the Strobist. Back then, there were no eTTL triggers, no cheap radio triggers, not even Cactus V2s. You were looking at PocketWizard Plus IIs and that was pretty much it. And a Plus II doesn't connect to a flash's hotshoe.

And David Hobby kept talking about using PC sync cords, and neither my Rebel nor my 580EX had sync ports, so I thought of this as one of those cool features I couldn't afford.

The 580EX was the top-of-the-line Canon flash when I bought it. It was $400. And it has no sync port of any kind. Nikon users pointed and laughed. But Canon shooters tend to be overly represented in the electronics geek community. And some folks quickly figured out that the sync circuit of a flash is probably the single simplest circuit in the world: a simple short. And they looked at the 3.5mm minijack connectors the Plus IIs were using, and after that, it was sync port modding all over the damn place.

I first encountered it on the POTN board's 580EX sync port mod thread. I have an EE/CS degree, but most of my education was in learning how to design SoC digital circuits, not so much the analog wires and soldering. I did build an alarm clock from components my sophomore year in college, but we used breadboards. Still, I'm grounded [pun intended] in the basics. Signal is signal. Ground is ground. Don't let the magic (previously known as "smoke") out of the ICs. What a capacitor looks like and how to safely discharge it (really, it doesn't require black magic and blood ritual sacrifice. It just takes a resistor and some patience and an accurate voltmeter).

But it still seemed like more than I wanted to tackle, even as I understood the simplicity of what was required: drill a hole, screw in the jack, solder connections to signal and ground on the jack and on the flash foot. Tip of jack/plug is signal, base is ground; on a hotshoe, the center pin/contact was signal, and the side contacts/rails are ground. I just didn't want to risk my $400 flash. Not without practice, and there wasn't really a way to practice without just doing it.

But then I got the YN-560. And I found that I really really hated my RF-602s' non-locking feet--particuarly if I was using that little plastic stand that comes with the flash. And things were more secure if I could take them out of the mounting "stack". But the YN-560's PC connector isn't screwlock, so it's not particularly secure, either. And I remembered that old mod... and thought, "hey, a $65 flash isn't such a huge risk." [Also, because you can just remove the screws holding the foot and then unplug it from the body of the flash to work on it separately, you're not anywhere near those scary capacitors.]

So, I got the tools and supplies, watched a lot of Youtube videos, bugged the hell out of my EE/Rover-restorer BIL for advice, pulled a PCB out of a busted calculator in my e-waste bin, and practiced desoldering and soldering surface-mount connections until I figured it wasn't going to help any more, and then I just went for it.



Not the best soldering job (I kinda uglified the ground connection), but it's not a cold join and it works. Dead easy to figure out what to solder to, as the foot only HAS the two connections. It's even properly color-coded: red for synch and black for ground. Looks like this on the outside:



And then I took a deep breath, and did the same thing on my 580EX's shoe (it's a little scarier because you have to dodge the eTTL pin connections, but essentially same deal. The POTN thread has great photos at the top to show you what goes where. Also, if you're as inexperienced at soldering as I was, read every post in that thread by the originator and Lon the FlashZebra dude. Their advice is golden).

I'm not saying you should do this. You probably don't need to. I'm not sure I needed to. Obviously, if I use this connector instead of the hotshoe on my 580EX, then I won't be able to use the wake-up function of my RF-602s. But it's nice to have the option and now I've got a way to add an optical slave to the 580EX if I want without needing a hotshoe adapter.

But if you're planning on becoming a Cybersync or Plus II user, you just want to buy your sync cables from Radio Shack, you've just had it with "reconditioning" your PC connectors, or you've been brainwashed by the Strobist like me then it's nice to know you can do these things.

If you want to do this with a smaller flash, though, like a 430EX/430EXII or SB-600/SB-700, you'll want to google around. There isn't enough room in the foot for a 3.5mm minijack. Some folks go for a 2.5mm minijack, others crack open the body and find a way to route the wires to the foot to a jack mounted on the face or side of the flash body.