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. So, when I recently saw a no-longer-working Godox V1 camera flash, which sells new for $259.99, listed on eBay for $66, I jumped on the deal. For teardown purposes, yes. But also, for reuse of its still-functional accessories elsewhere. And, as it turns out, to solve a mystery, too.
I’d long wanted to get inside the V1 for a look around (although its formidable price tag had acted as a deterrent), in part because of its robust feature set, which includes:
- High 76 Ws peak power (5600K color temperature)
- Fast (~1.5 sec) recycle time, and 480 full-power illuminations per battery charge cycle
- Supplemental 2 W “modeling lamp” (3300K color temperature)
- 28-105 mm zoom head (both manual and auto-sync to camera lens focal length setting options)
- 0°-330° horizontal pan and -7°-120° vertical tilt head
- Multiple camera shutter sync modes
- Multiple exposure control modes
- Auto (camera sync) and manual exposure compensation modes
- Camera autofocus-assist beam, and
- Last, but definitely not least, multi-flash master and slave sync options
And partly because this device, like many of the flash units from both Godox and other third-party flash manufacturers such as Neewer, comes in various options that support multiple manufacturers’ cameras. In the case of the V1, these include (differentiated via single-character suffixes in the otherwise identical product name):
- C: Canon
- N: Nikon
- S: Sony
- F: Fujifilm
- O: Olympus/Panasonic, and
- P: Pentax
That all aside, what probably caught your eye first in the earlier “stock” photo was the V1’s atypical round head, versus the more common rectangular configuration found in units such as Godox’s V860III (several examples of which, for various cameras, I also own):
The fundamental rationale for both products is their varying output-light coverage patterns:
Now, about those earlier-mentioned accessories:
The VB26-series battery used by the V1 is also conveniently also used by Godox’s V850III and V860III flash units, as well as the company’s RING72 ring light (optionally, along with the four-AA battery power-source default), and with Adorama’s Flashpoint-branded equivalents for all of these Godox devices, several of which I also own:
Here’s the capper. Shortly after buying this initial “for parts” Godox V1, for which the flash unit itself was the only thing nonfunctional, I came across another heavily discounted V1 that, as it turned out, worked fine but was missing the battery and charging cable. Guess what I did? 
About that battery cable…readers with long memories may recall me mentioning the VB26 before. The earlier discussion was in the context of the Olympus/Panasonic version of the V1 (i.e., the V1O), which had come with the original VB26 battery, and which I learned couldn’t be charged from a USB-C power source even though the battery charging dock had a USB-C input; a USB-A to USB-C adapter cable (along with a USB-A power source) was instead necessary. Well, in testing out the battery this time, I absentmindedly plugged it and its companion dock into a handy USB-C power source (and USB-C to USB-C cable) that normally finds use in charging my Google Pixel Buds Pro earbuds…and everything worked fine.
In retrospect, I remembered the earlier failure, and in striving to figure out what was different, I noticed that the battery this time was the more recent VB26A variant. I’d known that both it and its even newer VB26B successor held a bit more charge than the original, but Godox presumably fixed the initial USB-PD (Power Delivery) shortcoming in the evolutionary process, too (the charging circuitry is contained within the battery itself, apparently, with the dock acting solely as a “dummy” wiring translator between the USB-C connector and the battery terminals).
Enough of the prep discussion, let’s get to the tearing down. What we’re looking at today is the V1C, i.e., the Canon variant of the V1 (here’s a user manual):
I’ve long assumed that the various “flavors” of the V1 (and flash units like it) were essentially identical, save for different hot shoe modules and different firmware builds running inside. Although I won’t be dissecting multiple V1 variants today, the fact that they share a common 2ABYN001 FCC certification ID is a “bit” of a tipoff. I hope that this teardown will also shed at least a bit of added light on the accuracy-or-not of this hypothesis.
Open the box, and the goodies inside come into initial view. The cone-shaped white thing (silver on the other side) at top is a reflector, a retailer bundle adder intended for “bounce” uses:
As-usual accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes are the primary accessories: the standard USB-A to USB-C charging cable below the coin, and to the right, top-to-bottom, the battery, AC-to-DC converter (“wall wart”) and charging dock:
A closeup of the wall wart, complete with specs:
The underside of the battery, this time (as previously noted) the “A” version of the VB26:
And the charging dock, common to all VB26 battery variants:
Lift out the case containing the V1, and several other accessories come into view below it. At bottom right is a mini stand to which you mount the hot shoe when the flash unit isn’t being directly installed on/controlled by the camera (i.e., when the V1 is in wireless sync “slave” mode). And above it is another retailer adder, a goodie bag containing a lens cleaning cloth, a brush (useful when, for example, carefully brushing dust off the image sensor or, for a DSLR, the mirror) and a set of soft gloves.
Flip up the case top flap, and our victim comes into initial view:
Here’s a view of the backside, with the flash head near-vertical. The V1 has dimensions of 76x93x197 mm and weighs 420 g without the battery (530 g with it):
Here’s one (operating mode-dependent) example of what that LCD panel looks like with a turned-on functional V1:
Flip the V1 around for the front view, with the head at the same near-vertical orientation:
A closeup of the label (note, too, the small circular “hole” below the right corner of the label; file it away in your memory for later, when it’ll be important):
And of the translucent front panel, alluding to some of what’s inside:
The circular section at the bottom is for the focus assist beam, and to its left you can faintly see the wireless sensor used to sync the V1 (in either master or slave mode) with other flash units that support Godox’s 2.4 GHz “X” protocol as well as standalone transmitters and receivers:
Now’s as good a time as any, by the way, to show you Neewer’s reminiscent-named Z1:
The V1 and Z1 look the same, are similarly featured, and both use the 2.4 GHz ISM band for wireless sync purposes. Just don’t try to sync them to each other because the protocols differ.
Here’s a straight-on closeup of the V1 flash head:
That circular area at the top, which is toward the ground in normal operation (when the flash head isn’t pointed toward the sky, that is) is the modeling lamp, constantly on when activated versus a traditional “flash”. Here’s what it looks like on, again with an alternative functional V1:
And here are examples of the modeling lamp in use.
The ring around the outside of the flash head lens is metal, by the way, affording an opportunity for easy attachment of various magnet-augmented accessories:
Finally, some side views; first the left (when viewed from the front), containing the compartment “hole” into which the battery is inserted:
And now the right, containing the battery latch, release button and contacts:
The flash head at both extremes of its tilt range:
And a closeup of the QR code sticker on this side of the flash head:
Back to the right-side battery compartment closeup. In the earlier photo, you might have noticed what looked like a protective “flap” to the right of the cavity, and above the battery-release button. If so, you’d be right:
The round female connector at the top is not for headphones. It’s a 2.5 mm sync cord jack, for mating to a camera or transmitter as an alternative to a hot shoe or wireless connection. Below it is a USB-C connector used to connect to a computer for updating the flash unit firmware. On a hunch, I mated this supposedly “dead” V1 to my Mac and was surprised to find that the flash unit was recognized. I could even update its firmware, in fact, and all without a battery installed:
Even though this V1’s all-important illumination subsystem is DOA, it’s apparently not all-dead!
Last, but not least, let’s have a look at the hot shoe:
As previously mentioned, my working theory is that this (along with the software running inside the device) is the key differentiator between the V1 variants. It’s (perhaps unsurprisingly) also the most common thing that breaks on V1s:
So, I’ll be holding onto this part of the device long-term, both for just-in-case repair purposes and for another experimental project that I’ll tell you about later…
Did you notice the four screws holding the hot shoe assembly in place? Let’s see if their removal enables us to get inside:
Here’s the removed hot shoe assembly, both in the “loose” and “latched” positions (controlled by rotation of that grey button you see in the photos):
And here’s what’s inside:
Next step, remove the four “corner” screws whose heads were obscured by white paste in previous photos:
The outer bracket piece now lifts away:
Leaving an assemblage that, for already mentioned reasons, I’m not going to further disassemble, in order to preserve it for potential future use:
Unfortunately, although this initial disassembly step gave me a teaser peak at the insides, I wasn’t yet seemingly able to proceed further from this end:
So, I returned my attention to the flash head (the other end), around which I’d remembered seeing a set of screws that held the plastic cover and metal ring in place:
Underneath it was a Fresnel lens.
From Wikipedia:
A Fresnel lens…is a type of composite compact lens which reduces the amount of material required compared to a conventional lens by dividing the lens into a set of concentric annular sections…The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design. A Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens, in some cases taking the form of a flat sheet.
With the Fresnel lens removed, the Zenon tube assembly comes into clear view:
If you look at the bottom, you’ll see a two-rail “track” on which it moves forwards and backwards to implement, in conjunction with the fixed-position Fresnel lens, the zoom function.
I was able to unclip the brackets holding the fronts of both halves of the head assembly together, but further progress eluded me:
So, I next tried peeling away the round rubberized pieces covering both ends of the “tilt” hinge:
A-ha! Screws!
Now for the other side…
You know what comes next…
And now, one half (the lower half, to be precise) of the flash head enclosure lifts right off:
I initially thought that this mysterious red paste-covered doodad might be a piezoelectric speaker, for generating “beep” tones and the like, and its location coincides with the “hole” below the label that I showed you earlier, but…again, hold that thought:
We now get our first clear views of the flash head insides. Check out, for example, that sizeable heatsink for the modeling lamp LED!
Four screws hold the assembly in place within the other half-enclosure. Let’s get rid of these:
Liftoff!
Here’s our first glimpse of one side of this particular PCB. Look at that massive inductor coil!
Disconnect a couple of ribbon cables:
Tilt the assembly to the side:
Next, let’s remove the modeling lamp LED-plus-heatsink assemblage:
The two are sturdily glued together, so I won’t proceed further in trying to pry them apart:
Now let’s remove the PCB from the white plastic piece it’s normally attached to:
Let’s look first at the now-revealed PCB backside. First off, unsurprising mind you given the high current flow involved but still…look at those thick traces:
See those two switches? The motor position-controlled Zenon tube bumps up against them at the far end of its zoom travel range, seemingly disabling further motion in that direction (why there aren’t similar switch contacts at the rails’ other ends isn’t clear to me, however):
Finally, note the red-color, white paste-capped device in the upper right corner. Its “TB” PCB marking, along with the wire running from it to the Zenon tube, suggests to me that it may be a thermal breaker intended to temporarily disable the flash unit if it gets too hot. Ideas, readers?
Let’s now flip the PCB back over to the side we glimpsed earlier:
Time for a brief divergence into flash unit operation basics. In the “recharge” interval between flash activations, a sizeable capacitor (which we haven’t yet seen) gets “filled” by the battery electron flow. At least some of that stored capacitive charge then gets “dumped” into the Zenon tube. But here’s the trick…the Zenon tube’s illumination time and intensity vary depending on the camera’s desired exposure characteristics. So where does any “extra” current go, if not needed by the Zenon tube?
Initially, the excess electrons were instead shunted off to something called the quench tube, a wasteful approach that both limited battery life and unnecessarily lengthened recharge time. Nowadays, either gate turn-off (GTO) thyristors or insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) instead find use in cutting off the current flow from the capacitor, saving remaining charge for the next Zenon tube activation. I’m admittedly no power electronics design expert, so I can’t confidently say which approach is in use here. To assist the more knowledgeable-than-me readers among you (numerous, I know), note that the two devices above the coil are S6008D half-wave, unidirectional, gate-controlled rectifiers; the IC above them has the following marks:
EIC
SN
5M
Again, I say: further insights, readers?
Before moving on, let’s take a closer look at that zoom motor:
And now, let’s figure out how to get inside that hinge (where, I suspect, we’ll find that aforementioned sizeable capacitor). Looking closely at the ends I’d previously exposed, I noticed two more screws on each, but removing them didn’t seemingly get me any further along:
In the process of unscrewing them, however, I realized that I hadn’t yet showed you the pan range supported by the head:
And in the process of doing that, I noticed more screws underneath the pan hinge:
That’s more like it (although I’m now inside the main flash body, not yet the hinge above it)!
Let’s start with the now-detached back panel:
The LCD behind it is visible through the clear section, obviously, but don’t forget about the ribbon cable-fed multi-button-and-switch array below it:
That same panel piece from below, with another look at the ribbon cable:
And finally, that same panel piece from above:
Let’s return to that earlier inside view and get those four screws off:
The multi-button/switch assembly now lifts away straightaway:
And that black piece then pops right off, too:
Here’s a cross-section view of the circular multi-switch structure:
And with that, let’s return to the multi-sided structure we saw earlier, inside the main body:
Next are a series of sequential wiring disconnection shots; there are multiple ribbon cable harnesses, as you’ll see, some of them terminating in the tilt hinge above and some passing through the tilt hinge to the flash head above it:
With the front half of the main body shell now free and clear, let’s look at what’s inside:
That thing toward the bottom center, with a blue/black wire combo coming out of it, is the aforementioned focus assist beam. But what about the one in the upper left, with red and black wires coming out of it? Here’s a top view of the front-half piece; note the “hole” at bottom right at the corresponding external location:
Remember the mystery device inside the flash head, with a reminiscent red-and-black wire harness and external “hole”, that I initially thought was a speaker and asked you to remember?
I’d originally realized it wasn’t a speaker when I took my functional V1, activated its “beep” function and discerned that the sound wasn’t coming from there. But when I saw the second similar device-and-hole, I grabbed my functional (and fully assembled) V1 again and realized that when (and only when) the flash head was pointed horizontal and forward, the two “holes” lined up. My working theory is that one of the devices is an IR transmitter with the other an IR receiver, and that this alignment is how the flash figures out when the user has both the pan and tilt settings at their “normal” default positions. For what reason, I can’t yet precisely sort out; there’s no indication I can find in the user manual that the V1 operates any differently when pan and/or tilt are otherwise oriented. But conceptually, I could imagine that the flash’s integrated controller and/or connected camera might be interested in knowing whether the unit is being used for conventional or “bounce” purposes from an operating mode, exposure setting and/or other standpoint. Once again, readers: ideas?
At this point, by the way (and speaking of flash heads), the top half of this part of the case spontaneously disconnected from the pan-and-tilt hinge assembly:
Returning to the main body, let’s see what’s inside. Back, complete with the LCD (the on/off switch is in the lower right corner):
Right side:
Left side (note the battery latch, contacts, etc. initially highlighted before):
Front, with an initial “reveal” of the primary “power” PCB (although there’s plenty of analog stuff in the earlier flash head-located PCB too!):
Top:
And bottom, revealing a secondary “digital” PCB, glimpsed at earlier in conjunction with the hot shoe assembly removal, and that we’ll discuss further shortly:
There’s one more PCB of note, actually, which isn’t visible until after you remove two screws and disconnect the LCD assembly, then flip it around:
Here’s where the main system controller can be found, therefore why I refer to it as the primary “digital” PCB. It’s the APM32F072VBT6 (PDF), from a Chinese company called Geehy Semiconductor. The entire product family, as you’ll see from the PDF, contains dozens of members, based both on the Arm Cortex-M0+ and Cortex-M3. This particular SoC proliferation (at the top of the table labeled “APM32 MCU-ARM Cortex -M0+” in the PDF, for your ease of locating it) integrates a Cortex-M0+ running at 48 MHz along with 128 Kbytes of flash memory and 16 Kbytes of RAM. I can’t find a discrete flash memory chip for code storage on the PCB; the IC in the lower right corner is a LMV339 quad-channel comparator, and pretty much everything else here are connectors (such as the one at bottom labeled TTL, which ribbon cable-connects to the hot shoe assembly PCB) and passives. Oh, and the speaker’s in-between the hot shoe assembly ribbon cable connector and the comparator . Note, too, that this particular PCB is explicitly labeled “Canon”, addressing my earlier question as to whether the main assembly hardware was generic, i.e. differentiated solely by firmware, or camera manufacturer-specific to any degree.
Here’s a side view, showing the USB-C and 2.5 mm sync connectors:
And flipping the assembly back over, as well as flipping the LCD upside-down, you’ll find that this side of the PCB is effectively blank, save for the earlier-noted power switch:
Next, continuing with the “digital” theme, let’s look more closely at the bottom-mounted PCB:
This one requires a bit of background explanation.
I’ve already told you that the primary 2.4 GHz transceiver system for multi-unit sync purposes is upfront behind the red translucent panel, and you’ll see it again shortly. But there’s another 2.4 GHz transceiver system in the V1, this one Bluetooth-based and designed to enable flash unit configuration and control from a wirelessly tethered smartphone or tablet in conjunction with a Godox (or Adorama) app. That’s why, unsurprisingly now that you know the background, the two dominant ICs on this side of the PCB are Texas Instruments’ CC2500 low-power 2.4 GHz RF transceiver and, to its right, TI’s CC2592 front-end RF IC. Flip the PCB over:
and again, unsurprisingly, you’ll find the embedded Bluetooth antenna.
Finally, let’s look more closely at what I referred to earlier as the primary “power” PCB:
Many of the ICs here are similar to the ones we saw in the earlier flash head-located PCB, such as two more of those mysterious ones labeled “EIC” but now with slightly different second- and third-line marks:
EIC
SK
5B
And on the other side:
is more analog and power circuitry, including a sizeable capacitor at the bottom (albeit not as sizeable as I suspect we’ll see shortly!).
Speaking of which, let’s close by looking closely at that tilt hinge assembly. Here it is from the front:
Top:
and back:
All are fairly unmemorable. The left side is not much less boring:
At least until I tilt it slightly, revealing a green tint indicative of a PCB inside:
The right side is quite a bit busier, with wiring harnesses formerly running up to the flash head:
Even more titillating when I again tilt it, as well as moving wiring to the sides:
And speaking of wiring (and titillating relocation of same), here’s the bottom:
Cautiously, both because I don’t know exactly what’s on the other side and, if I’m right and it’s an enormous capacitor, whether it’s fully discharged, I proceed:
Enormous capacitor, indeed!
Refilling this sizeable “electron gas tank”, folks, explains the 1.5 second recycle time between flash activations, and makes the 480 activations per battery recharge all the more remarkable:
And with that, slightly more than 4,000 words in, I’m done! Not quite “in a flash”, but I still hope you found this teardown as interesting as I did. Sound off with your thoughts in the comments! And in closing, enjoy these two insides-revealing repair videos that I found during my research:
—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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