At 08:14 AM 11/1/2008, you wrote:
>If you're talking about "bees" in the name of "Alien Bees" that name was
>in use long before the company ever produced any sort of radio slave.
>The primary product is low cost studio flash units. The owner/designer
>if Paul Buff who also runs a higher cost studio flash unit company
>called "White Lightning". White Lightning flash units are very similar
>to Alien Bee units but are more robustly built. The radio slaves are a
>recent addition to the product line and are designed and built by Buff.
> They follow a radio slave product failure (unreliable operation) where
>the design and manufacture was from a Chinese source.
>
>This link gets you either place
><http://www.paulbuff.com/>
I could be totally wrong about the technology. I was assuming it might
be a ZigBee based system since the Alien Bee brochure says
16 channel frequencies, which exactly matches an 802.15.4 2.4GHz
radio. ZigBee OEM modules are cheap, such as the Panasonic modules:
http://www.panasonic.com/industrial/components/modules/mod_rfm.htm
which are a Freescale radio, and can run the same code base supplied by
Freescale. Some radios have LNA to increase the range, such as the
XBee pro. I have written my own code for both of these modules.
These http://www.rfm.com/products/oem_standalone.shtml modules
are based on TI radios for ZigBee. The SmartMesh XD are based on
Dust radios, which we were using in our startup for industrial wireless
control. The Dust XD is time synchronized channel hopping versions,
but are not fast event propagation.
The delay of 1/4000, or 250uS seems fast and does not match
what a typical 802.15.4 radio would do, plus he said the number came before
testing, and maybe assumed the 250K baudrate, rather than understanding
the packet rate. The Freescale radio software has a bug which limits resolution
to 4-8msec uncertainty. If that were fixed, I might be able to get 2mSec delay
for a short packet of 10-40 bytes. I'm not as familiar with the TI radio
software.
I spent some time finding the fastest response for these radio systems.
WayneS
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