“It’s Time for the PC Jack to Die.” (strobist.com) / Pimping your poverty wizards (aka ebay triggers)

(Heute mal ein Artikel in Englisch, ist für mehr als nur das Dutzend Leute gedacht, die hier sonst vorbei schauen…)

David Hobby wrote that it´s time for the PC jack to die. Right. And I´d like to show you how you can get closer to that goal by mounting audio jacks to your ebay triggers, cactus triggers, poverty wizards and all similiar one… I did this to one of my triggers quite a while ago and now I did it again and took some photos this time…

First of all you will need an audio jack. It´s cheaper to get some more, of course. I bought more than a dozen in a package on ebay. They cost me about 1 Euro + shipping costs. So, you´ll get them for nearly no money. If you don´t want to order on ebay get to your local audio/video salesman, they generally have some, too.

The ones I got are for stereo, but that´s no problem at all. They look like this:

Another thing you need is your poverty wizard. This „manual“ is based on the use of the „studio flash“-version…

What we will need later is an „audio jack to PC“-cable. You should get this from the seller of poverty wizards, too. I got mine from there and they work fine. Otherwise you could pimp your flashes and go for audio jacks there, too. Have a look in the strobist article for the link to the guys who pimp your flashes… Or get some kind of adapter or whatever. I will stick to these cables, although they have a PC jack.
UPDATE: Here is a little manual on how to adding an audio jackto your Sunpak 433 D. Check it out.

Ok, now comes the „fun part“. First you´ll have to open the trigger up. That´s no big deal, there are just two small screws on the backside.  Just screw them out and you´ll be fine and see the innards… ;-D

Let´s have a check on what we see. Ok, there´s the little circuit board of course. The silver thing in the bottom of the trigger case is the PC-Jack. The cable with the blue and red wire is going to the phone jack we saw in the picture above. So, no magic at all.

Now we need to get rid of
a) the PC-Jack and
b) the phone jack with its cords.

Time to heat up your soldering iron, so that we can move on without a break…

If you want more space to work you can cut the red wire which goes to the middle of the PC Jack. Then loose that little silver ring which looks a bit like a cogwheel and you can press the PC-Jack out of the case. Without destroying anything… :-D

Now we need to unsolder the wires from the circuit board. The soldering iron should be ready, so unsolder all four wires from the circuit board. Don´t know how to do that? Ok, I´ll try to explain. Heat up the brazing solder from the backside of the circuit board and carefully pull on the wires while doing so. If the solder gets liquid you can pull the wire out… If you´re done, you should have something like this:

The next part ist preparing the case. I used a small sawing blade, a rasp and a file to do so. The cutout fits the jack pretty good this way. Just don´t take too much material away. You´ll get ugly „holes“ in the case then. That´s not necessary. It´s better to add some finishing touches in the end. I had to do so, too.

As you have possibly noticed my jack has lost all its cables on this picture. That´s because the ones which were mounted at the beginning were not flexible enough to fit in the relative small case. I found it easier to solder new ones to it when necessary.

That´s already the next step, by the way. Soldering your jack to the circuit board again. And if you managed to unsolder the old wires, you´ll surely manage to solder the new ones, too.

Although it´s rather easy there are a few things you should have in mind:

• The case is not big. If you like to have the wires a bit longer you´ll have to deal with that when assembling the whole package again. As you can see from the image I chose to have the wires a bit longer, too. This already caused some problems due to the relative big jack in the small case…
• Some of the components on the circuit board are possibly sensitive for heat. So, having the soldering iron rest on them could damage or destroy them. Ok, it might not be very critical in this case but you should try to work fast and clean…
• It does not matter which cable you solder where, the only mistake you can make is solder them both to the same pin. The whole thing a PC-connection or this inexpensive triggers do is closing a circuit. There´s not much to do wrong on that…

Ok, we are almost done. Just reassamble everything and expect some problems to appear right now. In my case there was a little transistor (or whatever) that collided with the jack. After bending the transistor everything was fine and I could reassamble the trigger.

It now looks like this:

(Quite professional, heh?)

Ok, the great moment is coming near…  Connect your pimped trigger via the cable with your flash, set the channels and FIRE! :-D

Well, seems as if it works…

Hope you liked this little walkthrough/tutorial/blog entry/whatever. Have a look at my flickr album with these images. I left some notices and hope they might help you…

Greetings to all Strobists out there! :-D

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