You can get spring loaded miniature contact pins from digikey or Newark, cheap as dirt I think. The other way to go (other folks have done it this way) is to buy a cheap ($12) hot shoe extension cable, remove the housing around the end you need and cut the other end off.
Amazon.com : NEEWER® White TTL Off-camera Flash Hotshoe Connector Cord for Olympus/Panasonic Version Cameras and Flashes : Camera & Photo
for a version that looks like it comes apart pretty easily.
Bill
Was not aware of spring loaded contacts - I would like to investigate this as they may be useful for my perfboard idea. Do you have a part # or a link?
My fallback idea is based upon a standard hobby perfboard (they ALL seem to be 1.6mm thickness) that I can cut a small hot shoe square out of. But this will be a sloppy fit as my online searches have determined that a hot shoe "foot" needs to be 1.9 mm tall. My idea was to push solid pins through the perf board and protrude on the bottom to make up the slack and even put a little pressure on the contacts. We will see how that goes. Spring loaded may be better, if they fit in the vertical restrictions.
The off shoe cable is a good idea that I looked into but I believe it is a non starter. They are as useful as the dead flash idea. The hotshoe connector is very tall, too tall to fit in my project (some, many, all?) housing for a camera with a builtin (not pop up ) flash. From my first batch of 3 dead flashes I discarded 2 and the survivor foot unit measures 11.9mm vertical. Too tall for real life (see below) but worked fine for my first tests of converting my optical P&S (DX1g) to wired sync.
My current project housing has 6.5mm vertical space above the hotshoe connector surface. More room would require that I cut a groove in the inside of the housing. It is a polycarb housing only 5.33mm thick. I would not be comfortable (but have NO scientific basis for this) for a groove deeper than 2mm. So I still need a less than 8.5mm profile connector. The hotshoe adaptor foot is way too tall.
A scavenged hotshoe connector from a Sea & Sea housing clocks in at around 6.8mm (+- 1mm as it is a little sloppy from front to back). This connector jams into the un-altered housing at the front of the hotshoe. Not sure if this will affect its operation. I will NOT use it unless I groove the housing or grind the connector down.
For my prior project, the scavenged hotshoe connector I am using in my DX1G housing is 6.82mm tall, but has lots of vertical clearance as the housing was designed to accommodate a popup flash. The only issue with this housing was finding adequate internal clearance for the Nikonos style bulkhead connector.
The bottom line is:
- there is lots of room in housing designed for pop up flash. BUT be prepared to not use the popup flash if it uses the same space as the hot shoe....
- builtin or non flash housings are very tight.
