Technically, this is a small LED light source on which you can set the color temperature or even the hue/saturation.
My initial purpose was to use is as a back light for a slide copier but it will have additional purposes, since it seems very well suited for macro work.
Seems like it is this: MC - Aputure
Seems cool! Can you use it without the phone app?
Yes, there is an on-off button and wheel/push-button combo and AFAIK you can set everything from there. There is also a small display (visible at top left in the green picture, says HUE: 180°.
Comes with a nice little pouch, and a silicone diffuser (mounted in the pictures above). There is a pair of rather strong magnets at the back, and the standard photo screw thread at the bottom. Also comes with adhesive Velcro pads but I don’t think I’ll ever use them.
Nice one, @Ofnuts!
Which of its Light FX settings is your favourite?
The Paparazzi, I presume? :-)))
Addendum: 7 Lighting Effects in 7 Minutes - YouTube
If you are in a tinkering mood, you can easily
make mini-snoots, and mini-reflectors for it.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Light FX are for videos… so not really useful right now…
I was just thinking of building something like this, but… wow, looks like just what I want for some negative capture.
Is it easy to hit 100% red, green, and blue with 0% of any other color?
The one disadvantage this has for slide and negative work is that the diffuser front is not flat - even with another diffuser, it could lead to uneven illumination.
Edit: That’s an auxiliary diffuser? Hmm, even more tempting. Too bad the protocol isn’t documented so you can script it from Python, Sidus Link could be problematic for integration.
0%; I doubt
Direct shots of the device (Av mode, so exposure isn’t the same) in “HSI” mode, with Hue: 0°, 120°, 240°, Saturation: 100% and Intensity: 25%:
The device illuminating my gray reference, in manual mode (so same exposure for all three) in “HSI” mode, with Hue: 0°, 120°, 240°, Saturation: 100% and Intensity: 50%:
I can upload the CR2s (or share via DropBox) if interested.
In my case, the slide copier already has its own diffuser. The slide copier seems to have a bit of vignetting anyway so I could perhaps calibrate the whole thing with lensfun.
Thanks. My slide copier also has a built-in diffuser, but unless there’s significant spacing between the MC and the copier’s diffuser, there’s going to be some uneven lighting.
I’m definitely leaning towards this, since that’s a problem that could be solved (tube with barium sulfate paint on the inside).
I have a strong desire to automate my captures to some degree, and the fact that Sidus Link is the only way to control these other than the local controls is a bit concerning to me unless the protocol is simple. (Sidus Mesh concerns me that it might not be…)
If you have an Android device and not iOS, could you get a Bluetooth HCI log of you changing a bunch of settings? How to get the Bluetooth Host Controller Interface logs from a modern Android phone | by Charlie Anderson | Medium
@Ofnuts Does the colour picker function work
as advertised (i.e. point it at something, and
it will start to emit that object’s colour)?
As a side note, this looks like roughly a clone of the LumeCube, and there are a LOT of other LumeCube clones out there.
For those with Amazon Prime, Amazon’s prime sale is going on now and a lot of Neewer’s app-controlled lights are on sale. The SL80 seems to be their LumeCube/AputureMC clone, there’s another slightly larger light with swappable batteries for a little more - I just ordered https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08KDP9GYP/
Aputure’s Sidus Mesh actually is a feature that was a negative for me, because it indicates their Bluetooth control protocol might be a bit more complex than a basic Bluetooth SPP implementation. Of course, Neewer’s app control could have the same flaw of being some custom raw BLE protocol, but the chances of it being something easy to reverse engineer and reimplement in Python are slightly greater.
Mine arrives Thursday which is bad timing for hacking, as I have family coming into town to visit on Friday.
The color picker is a function of SidusLink: it uses your phone camera to get the color, then tells the MC to emit that color.
Thank you, @Ofnuts!
You gave me a bright idea 
I do not own an Aputure MC, just an el-cheapo
version of an RGB video light which does not
communicate with any apps at all.
But I can still use the Sidus Link app you mentioned
to obtain all pertinent values — which I then have to key
in manually, of course, but still…
Quite useful and effective!
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
So my Neewer 176-LED unit arrived - larger than the Aputure unit but significantly cheaper ($48 instead of $90, and I got mine even cheaper than that during Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale). See above for the Amazon link to what I bought.
It uses BLE and not Bluetooth SPP - but with an HCI snoop log from my Android phone it wasn’t too hard to reverse engineer anyway. I’ve got a python script that can rotate hue in 120 degree increments on my laptop now. I’ll clean it up and turn it into a module and push it to github sometime next week. I don’t know if it is the unit or the “bleak” python module ( GitHub - hbldh/bleak: Bluetooth Low Energy platform Agnostic Klient for Python ), but controlling it from a laptop is really flaky/unreliable. Does not seem to affect the phone, so I’m guessing it is a problem in bleak.
An interesting observation in mine - the white LED phosphors parasitically energize from the blue LEDs in the RGB array to a small degree.
One minor disadvantage of the unit I bought is that local control is utter garbage - dimming and some basic mode changes.
Cool device for back-lighting when shooting translucent things…
Light source intentionally set to blueish tint. The underlying “mirror” is my smartphone screen.
Hi Andy, can I ask you if you were able to bypass the Sidus software to control your Aputure light ?
I struggle a lot with my Amaran 200s and 300C, I would like to use it with Python or any other way to communicate with it from a PC instead of a Tablet or Cellphone.
Let me know
Thanks !
Nick
I think I mentioned, but I bought a Neewer light instead of the Aputure mentioned here.
IF it’s Bluetooth LE, Sniffing/logging your own Android Bluetooth traffic - Stack Overflow and Wireshark will be useful to determine which services/characteristics you need to write to and what you need to write to them. If it’s not BLE, well Wireshark might help as long as it’s not encrypted traffic.
GitHub - Entropy512/rgb_led_filmscan: RGB LED capture of film negatives, inspired by NateWeatherly on discuss.pixls.us has an example of controlling the Neewer light to do RGB backlit film scanning in Python. I switched from bleak to SimplePyBLE for various reasons. If the Aputure lights are BLE you should be able to use that along with a sniff capture as a starting point.
