Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

Just ran into this today. could be a good thing for people with Iphones and maybe idea's to redesign the C.C. at lease to make it built stronger. I have a C.C. and love it for the control and light meter
which I use on all my shoots but would like to see it built better and have better button and maybe placements to it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bREeOSMuDwU

It was a freaking waste of time joke/prank by sopha...

http://thesopha.com/hahaha/

I generally do not mind these things but when you get people to pledge money then laugh at them I find that insanely childish, rude and unprofessional.

I am probably angrier than I should be but it really rubbed me the wrong way and I wanted to notify people before/in-case they pledged money to that kick-starter.

Well, it is April Fools Day.

Thanks for the link and exposing those assholes. Here was my comment to them "Just saw the gotcha video to this fake product. A real dick move to promote your cause. Wonder how trust worthy that organization is if it needs some clowns pulling stunts to donate to them".

What many don't realize is that I am a human being - not some big corporation with hundreds of engineers. While I've developed a fairly thick skin after 50 years of coming up with concepts, then doing essentially all the engineering and design work and marketing to make products of them, I feel sorry for jerks like this who slam them around on a table and make fun of them.

Cyber Commander and Einstein and all the rest of my products may not be the pinnacle of product design in every possible area, but where are the equivalent products from those companies that do have teams of engineers, mold designers, programmers, etc?

Talk is cheap. Putting people down and lying is even cheaper.

TY Paul

I think your reply made me realize why this got to me so much... I am not a guy that is easy to anger but it is because this is a company where the Engineer/CEO is happy to share his opinion and take time out of his day to respond.

I dropped Profoto and Elinchrom the day my first Einstein came in the mail and I could do a side by side by side with them; I was so happy to no longer be TERRIFIED I might drop a bulb and lose $350! Oh and the Einstein KILLED them both! (Profoto Compact 600, Elinchrom Style 600RX)

Between the GREAT products (I freaking LOVE my Einsteins, and my Vagabonds and even my Bees) The awesome customer service and the fact that I can read hundreds of posts from you that do not treat the reader like a 3rd grader!

I have talked so many people into going PCB for both modifiers and strobes that you might think I secretly work in your sales department :p

You have gained a loyal customer for life... a damn lot of them!

LOL. Soooo obviously FAKE :)
That should have been a dead giveaway. You can't make a receiver transmit like they described :-P

You can probably hack up a cybercommander so it's controllable via an Android phone and an IOIO adapter. The iPhone isn't open enough to do something like that unless you pay Apple some fairly steep fees to get access to their accessory SDK.

But you're hacking up a CC, so it'd be the cost of a CC + Android phone + adapter you graft onto the CC so cost would be fairly high and PCB users would gripe about the price (I still remember the whining about the white BD being more expensive than the flimsier silver one by people who haven't used both)-:

Well they are actually transceivers not receivers so the communication is 2 ways. Either way there were several pledges to their kickstarter which got removed form the site...

The reality is that if that was available for Android I would have probably blindly given them money as well... I think chance of the added functionality would be well worth $50... I would have paid WAY more than that to not have had to teach my girlfriend how to use her C.C. :shock:

They went about everything in a very sneaky, under-handed way... This is the first April fools joke I have ever seen where you go as far as letting people make a payment to you; Then make fun of them for doing it... THEN tell them that they were going to throw away their money on a scam so they should donate to my charity of choice...

I'm sure Kickstarter was pretty p*ssed at them for that too.
And AFAIK, the Einstein CSXCV is merely a receiver...only the old CSRB could do that in repeater mode (and it only relayed the "fire" message).

For teaching your girlfriend, set up your CC first. Then tell her the left joystick controls power and the right one controls test firing (the right controls different modes too, but you can tell her to ignore that for a while until she understands the power/fire concept). It's really not too bad once set up.

The Android hack would be ugly as hell since there's no way to feed commands to the CC directly. But it can definitely be done...not by modifying a CSXCV though ;)
Maybe I'll get to it after my speedlight hack...

CSXCV is a transceiver, too. Not only does it receive fire and adjustment commands, it also transmits back to the Cyber Commander the Einstein's status. It does not, however relay a fire signal like the other four Cyber Sync receivers.