As I conceptually discussed last May, following up with a teardown nearly a year later (and earlier this year), master flash units mated to cameras’ hot shoes are often also capable of, whether via IR or various RF schemes, also controlling slave illumination devices located elsewhere in a studio or other picture-shooting location.
But what if you don’t want to restrict yourself from a lighting-setup standpoint to connecting at least one flash unit directly to your image-capture device for resultant full-frontal illumination of your subject? Extension cords can get you a foot or so away while retaining the full-featured physical tether, for example:
That said, an even more flexible approach mates the camera to a dedicated-function transmitter (also commonly referred to as a “trigger”), with all lighting sources in the setup controlled by it and subsequently acting as slaves. This approach is equally beneficial if you do desire full-frontal illumination of your subject but your main flash unit isn’t sufficiently “intelligent”, since such transmitters are typically camera-cognizant (thereby handling the “intelligence” themselves) and support “dumb” hot shoe and cable sync options to a close-proximity flash, too.
Today’s teardown victim, from Godox, is one such example. The means by which I came into possession of it is admittedly atypical. Reiterating what I wrote in my Godox V1 flash unit teardown from earlier this year:
As regular readers already know, “for parts only” discount-priced eBay postings, suggestive of devices that are (for one reason or another) no longer functional, are often fruitful teardown candidates as supplements to products that have died on me personally.
The patient this time is another example of this longstanding “dumpster diving” tendency…or at least I thought it was going to be. Back in March, well-known used imaging equipment retailer KEH held one of its periodic “inventory reduction” sales, this one offering 15% off a subset of its warehouse stock. One of the things that caught my eye was a “Godox X1T-F TTL Wireless Flash Trigger Transmitter for Fujifilm” in “as-is” condition for $3.65 before discount, $3.10 after:
“1” in the product code means first-generation, “T” stands for “transmitter” (or “trigger”), “F” means that it’s intended for use with Fujifilm cameras…and “as-is”, paraphrasing KEH, basically means that best-case it’s cosmetically beat up and worst-case it doesn’t work at all. And indeed, when it arrived, that’s what the sticker attached to the bag containing the transmitter indicated:
What was inside the bag, however, was something much better, a second-generation Godox X2T-F in pristine cosmetic condition (the Canon version of the X2T is shown in the following “stock” photo):
seemingly fully functional, to boot:
I don’t own any Fujifilm cameras, which wasn’t a problem given my original teardown-only plan for the as-is X1T device, and which also precludes me from definitively determining this X2T’s functional-or-not status. However, given that it seems to be fine, I’m going to do my utmost to do no permanent damage to it during my my disassembly, so that I can subsequently put it back together and donation-pass it on, where it’ll hopefully find good use for some time to come. To wit, I’ll restrain myself from any “extreme” dissection that might be permanently maiming.
To begin, here are some overview shots, as usual accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes. Front: in the upper left is the autofocus-assist lamp:
Right side: the USB-C connector is used for firmware updates, and the 3.5-mm sync jack can be settings-configured either as an input (as a transmitter-triggering alternative to the “intelligent” hot shoe at the bottom) or an output (as a tethered alternative to alternatively firing a “slave” flash device either wirelessly or via the “dumb” hot shoe at the top):
Back:
Left side: the switch on the left is for overall unit power control, while the one on the right enables or disables the AF-assist lamp:
Top: note first the “dumb” hot shoe to, as mentioned earlier, control a separate “slave” flash unit. Also note the Bluetooth logo; as with the earlier-dissected V1 flash unit, this transmitter not only controls other Godox (or rebranded Adorama) equipment via the proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless X protocol but also optionally supports itself being configured and controlled by a Bluetooth-tethered smartphone or tablet in conjunction with a Godox (or Adorama) app:
And finally, the bottom, with its comparatively “intelligent” hot shoe for mating with a (Fujifilm, in this particular case) camera:
Time to dive in. In prior pictures, you may have already noticed three (now removed) screws’ visible heads:
one at the bottom:
and one on each side:
Extracting them unfortunately didn’t get me very far, though:
And a scrape-away of the left-side QC sticker didn’t reveal any more screw heads underneath:
so next, I looked inside the underside battery compartment:
Ah yes, there we are. Two more screw heads:
That’s more like it:
First, here’s a closeup of the left half of the previous photo, revealing the inside (and underside) of the top half of the device:
And, jumping ahead in time, another perspective after disconnecting the two-wire tether between the “dumb” hot shoe and the system PCB that controls it (the lens in front of the AF-assist beam also detached from the device bottom-half in the process):
About that two-wire tether: remember my earlier discussed differentiation between “smart” and “dumb” hot shoes? I’ll confess at this point that I sorted this all out retroactively, after initially being momentarily baffled as to why there were only two wires (switched power and ground) coming out of the topside hot shoe…
A brief rewind-in-time now to the right half of the earlier overview shot, first still tethered:
And now standalone:
Along with three side-view perspectives:
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of component commonality between this design and that of the previously detailed Godox V1 flash. They’re both based on the same main system controller, for example, the APM32F072VBT6 (PDF), from a Chinese company called Geehy Semiconductor, integrating an Arm Cortex-M0+ running at 48 MHz along with 128 Kbytes of flash memory and 16 Kbytes of RAM. It’s in the upper left corner of the PCB, adorned with a pink ink dot, if you haven’t already noticed it (but given its comparative size, you probably already did).
You probably also already noticed the two identical-looking PCB-embedded antennae at the bottom. Above the one to the right is the same multi-component (and more general PCB) layout as that found in the V1: Texas Instruments’ CC2500 low-power 2.4 GHz RF transceiver and TI’s CC2592 front-end RF IC, so per proximity I’m guessing that this one handles Bluetooth connectivity. By the process of elimination, then, I’ll also hazard a deduction that the other antenna, to its left, implements Godox’ X wireless protocol in conjunction with whatever circuitry is inside the silver module with which it shares a common mini-PCB.
And did you also notice the three additional screw heads? You know what comes next, right?
Disconnect one more two-wire harness, this one going to the AF-assist beam subsystem:
Push through the case openings one side’s worth of battery terminals:
(the other side’s terminals are permanently attached the case, not connected to the PCB):
And voila:
Here’s an overview of the now-exposed main PCB backside, with battery terminals in the upper left, the two aforementioned left-side switches at bottom left, the USB-C and sync connectors at bottom right and ribbon cables (which, as previously discussed, along with the one connected to the other side of the main PCB, I’m not going to chance disconnecting) along the lower edge and leading elsewhere:
We’re now looking toward the inside of the bottom of the device, where both of those thinner ribbon cables end up. At left is the underside of the “smart” hot shoe, while at right is the control dial you may have noticed in earlier overview shots:
Wrapping things up, here’s the backside of the device, mated to ribbon cables for the display (the wider one at left) and control buttons (the narrower one at right):
And now, first taking a deep breath for calming confidence, I retraced my prior disassembly steps in reverse. Aside from a brief moment of panic when I thought I’d lost a screw (which ended up just being stuck in the recesses of the matching-color case), the process went smoothly. And, after taking another deep breath, popping two AAs in and flipping the power switch on, this is what I saw:
I seem to have successfully resurrected it, again to the limits of my no-Fujitsu-camera testing abilities. Yay! Sound off with your thoughts in the comments.
—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.
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