Note: I am not responsible for any damage that may occur to your equipment. This is a demonstration of my hack/mod of how I did this using my equipment. Do not perform this on your own unless you are trained in electricity and electronics and willing to take a chance of ruining your equipment. I AM NOT HELD LIABLE.
STEP 1: POWER. In my trial, I am using a generic "battery eliminator" power adapter that you can pretty much pick up anywhere. It has adjustable voltage and in this case milliampere. Some also have a polarity switch.
Completed unit
STEP 2: How to connect it and basic electrical design.
So this is the inside of the battery compartment. Basically there are four AA batteries lined up giving us power. They can be in a straight line but it wouldn't work for the design of the unit so they are arranged in such a way to fit into the container and connected via little metal tabs pos to neg, pos to neg, etc, etc.
So our first job is to find out where the positive and negative terminals are inside the flash and viola, they are the ones that are the beginning and the end of the trail ie not connecting to anything else. See second photo
And by looking at the sticker for battery orientation, we can deduce the positive and the negative terminals.
So now that we know where we need to connect the (+) positive side of our power supply and (-) negative.. how do we hook this up?
STEP 3: DUMMIES As I said as I am not drilling any holes (yet) I opted to make dummy batteries to make an electrical connection. Since we only need to apply power to 2 terminals (tabs) (all the other stuff is just used to connect the batteries together) I just need to make something that will connect our two wires from the PS and fills the space like batteries would and still be removable so I can still use batteries when on-location. So I took a AA battery to the good ole hardware store and found that a 1/2" dowel is pretty darn close.
I cut up four pieces the same length as a AA battery and grouped them together to fit into the battery compartment and since wood does not conduct electricity well I took the wire from the power supply, trimmed back the insulation and wrapped it around these screws that will function like the "nipple" on the battery for the electrical connection...
and yes I know the negative post does not have a nipple but I need to make the connection so am using it in my case. Now to make sure that the orientation of the wires and screws will connect to the proper place in the battery compartment as seen in the second photo.
Now I have a way to connect my DC powered hotshoe flash to an AC wall outlet and shoot as much as I want without worrying about batteries :)
