Monthly Archives: October 2008

Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Extra head rotation

The head of the Sigma EF-500 DG Super rotates 180degrees if rotated to the left (photographer’s view) but only 90deg to the right.

I always found that limiting, so since I had the guts spilled on my table trying to figure out the sync port, I decided to modify the head rotation of the flash at the same time.

What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.
WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit.

Continue reading

Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Sync port – part 2

In part one I described how I tapped into the electronics of my Sigma EF-500 DG Super to provide me with an access point to trigger the flash from a sync port.

In this post I will discuss how I added the actual sync port: physical mounting, and lessons learned.

What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.
WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit. This hack involves a little soldering.

Continue reading

Hacking the Sigma EF-500 DG Super strobe : Sync port – part 1

Recently I’ve been starting to learn more about flash photography compliments of The Strobist.
Then I bought a set of cheap ebay wireless flash triggers to alow me to trigger the flash remotely, but with the Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash, that was not possible.

UPDATE: Recently purchased a set set of Yongnuo RF- 602 2.4 Ghz wireless triggers from ebay (they’re quite cheap), and they work flawlessly with the Sigma flash, without any modifications. If you want a sync port, try the method below, but if all you want is to trigger the Sigma flash, buying a set of the RF-602 triggers is by far the simplest way of doing it.

Most other flashes out there can easily be triggered by shorting out the two main terminals on the hot-show. But not on this sigma. So I had to find another way to trigger the flash manually, which led to the decision to hack my flash to get a sync port.

What follows is my own documentation of what I did to my unit.I will not be responsible if you accidentally destroy your flash, or worse, hurt yourself: capacitors in the flash can hold their charge for a long time waiting for someone to poke them the wrong way.
WARNING: This hack will FOR SURE void your warranty. This hack also involves permanently modifying your unit. This hack involves a little soldering.

Continue reading

Firewall setup for home

I think I’ve hit upon the ideal (for me) setup of the firewall.
The internet connection will look something like this:

Internet –> Cable Modem –> pfsense router (as VM) –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN

The main reason for this setup is redundancy. If the VM dies, or the VM server goes down, I can very quickly go to this alternate setup:

Internet –> Cable Modem –> Dlink 524? router –> LAN

by just plugging the cable modem in to the dlink router instead of pfsense software firewall.
The router will take case of assigning IP addresses, so that feature needs to be disabled in pfsense (so there’s no fighting)
With this setup I can have control of the data that goes out on the net (shape it anyway I want with pfsense) and still have the flexibility to remove it from the chain, without making ANY setup changes to keep the network connectivity going (Very important, in order to keep a high WAF)