The Flashpoint R2pro TTL Transmitter is a reasonably priced device that when put into a camera’s hot-shoe, can trigger speed-lights over a long distance. It works well on my Canon DSLR (there are versions for all major camera brands), supports HSS (high-speed-sync up to 1/8000), 32 channels and 16 groups.
The large graphic display shows 5 groups at a time or one group’s settings in a larger font size. In the manual setting, a flash’s power can be set from 1/1 to 1/256 . The Flashpoint R2pro (also known as Godox XPro) does not only work with Flashpoint’s, but also any speed-light with a Canon compatible hot-shoe.
Every now and then Godox / Adorama releases a firmware update for these kinds of device, (the firmware is initial Godox just releases is many month before Adorama), Anyways, no matter where you bet it from, it require Windows to deploy them .. I know, what are they thinking? This time I didn’t go the VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox route, installing Windows on my Mac etc etc. Instead homebrew and dfu-util did the trick.
Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on Apple’s macOS operating system. With home-brew installed, dfu-util is quickly installed like so:
brew install dfu-util
Now I removed the batteries form the Flashpoint R2pro and switched it on, to completely remove any charge from the device, before connection it with a USB-C cable to my Mac.
I downloaded the latest firmware from Godox and extracted the ZIP archive, opened Terminal and CD-ed into the newly created folder:
cd ~/Downloads/Godox_XproC_V2.0
Now I ran the dfu-util -l command, which discovered the connected R2pro
dfu-util 0.10 Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc. Copyright 2010-2020 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/ Found DFU: [0483:df11] ver=0200, devnum=19, cfg=1, intf=0, path="20-6", alt=0, name="@Internal Flash /0x08000000/12*01Ka,52*01Kg", serial="0A7A374F3231"
The alt parameter is important and needs to be transferred into the next step, which flashes the new firmware:
dfu-util --alt 0 --download ./Xpro-C\ V2.0.dfu
The output looked like this:
dfu-util 0.10 Copyright 2005-2009 Weston Schmidt, Harald Welte and OpenMoko Inc. Copyright 2010-2020 Tormod Volden and Stefan Schmidt This program is Free Software and has ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY Please report bugs to http://sourceforge.net/p/dfu-util/tickets/ Match vendor ID from file: 0483 Match product ID from file: 0000 Opening DFU capable USB device... ID 0483:df11 Run-time device DFU version 011a Claiming USB DFU Interface... Setting Alternate Setting #0 ... Determining device status: state = dfuIDLE, status = 0 dfuIDLE, continuing DFU mode device DFU version 011a Device returned transfer size 1024 DfuSe interface name: "Internal Flash " file contains 1 DFU images Please note that the next version of dfu-util will automatically set alternate interfaces based on the DfuSe file images! parsing DFU image 1 Target name: ST... image for alternate setting 0, (1 elements, total size = 53244) parsing element 1, address = 0x08003000, size = 53236 Erase [=========================] 100% 53236 bytes Erase done. Download [=========================] 100% 53236 bytes Download done. Done parsing DfuSe file
.. all done the new V2.0 firmware is now running on the Flashpoint R2 Transmitter.