Nikon Z8 flash not firing with strobes

[cetacean]

Ok here goes what was done to get this working, I called Isotta this morning when I woke up and we hopped on a WhatsApp video call and the first thing they noticed was the LEDs were remaining on, which isn't by design, they should be in the off state by design and only fire (Flash the LED) when you want to strobe to fire. This was my initial confusion as to what the default state is, I wasn't sure if the brief absence of light fires the strobe or the opposite; thus, it started the isolation troubleshooting, which the Isotta team in Italy is incredibly good at and were dedicated to getting this working for us for the trip we have tomorrow.

In a nutshell, after isolating different components it seemed as if the problem is on one end of the "shoebox", either the box itself that connects to the camera or the other board the wires are soldered too. We isolated the wires to just the green and yellow wires since I'm only doing manual optical flash triggering and we noticed what looked like some residue on the solering, so we cleaned the contacts and put everything back together and then it started working as designed.

They normally wouldn't have gone through so much, but they wanted to isolate and get this working prior to our travels and will be sending us a new unit to replace the one we modified to isolate the problem, just to ensure it won't creep back up.

Glad you got it figured out before your trip...

Interesting that the unit ever shipped from Isotta - as this is something that should have been caught in whatever QA process they have.

There is some good learning here...