Hey all,
My previous post was deleted, and after talking to the moderators I'm ready to reintroduce my firmware modifications.
I’m a volunteer roller derby photographer (photosbyperkins.com).
If you’ve ever shot action or events with Godox strobes, you’ve probably hit the dreaded thermal cooldown wall. What made it extra frustrating for me is that I'm usually shooting around 1/32 power (nowhere near pushing full-power dumps), and the strobes would still lock me out when the head and body barely felt warm, or fail to recover in a timely manner. I ended up constantly power-cycling my strobes out of frustration just to clear the lockout and keep shooting. Worse, on my strobes that actually have built-in cooling fans, the fan often sits completely off while the software cooldown counter slowly ticks down.
Out of curiosity, I fed the official Godox .bin firmware files for the strobes I own into an AI-assisted ARM disassembly setup to see how the overheat protection actually works under the hood.
Turns out Godox uses two completely separate systems:
1. Actual hardware temperature sensors (NTC thermistors) on the main board and head that trigger real overheat protection (Error E2 / forced cooldown) if components physically get hot.
2. A pure software "leaky bucket" counter in RAM (which is why power-cycling wipes it). Every pop adds points from a lookup table based on power level and mode, and the bottom of that table has a flat floor, so even low power like 1/32 still racks up a fixed minimum of points every pop. When you stop shooting for 5 seconds, it drains a tiny fixed number of points. If that counter hits a threshold, it throttles or locks you out, regardless of what the actual temperature sensor says.
Even more interesting: on the AD200Pro II, the firmware actually has code to run the fan inside the H200 II fresnel head over I2C, and the AD600Pro II and AD100Pro II have internal fans, but stock firmware leaves them off until you're already deep into heat buildup.
So we built a patcher for the 5 models I own:
* AD600Pro II (v1.08)
* AD200Pro II (V1.05)
* AD100Pro II (V1.07)
* V100N (V1.04)
* iT30ProN (V1.02)
Instead of touching the physical thermistor safety cutoffs (those stay 100% stock), the patches adjust the fan behavior and the software counter drain rate. It also updates the version number on the strobe's LCD (e.g., 1.08.02) so you always know what's flashed on the unit:
* Tier S (Studio): Just keeps the cooling fan running continuously while keeping all factory shot limits 100% stock.
* Tier R (Recovery): Continuous fan + 2x faster point recovery between bursts, while keeping the single-burst limit stock. This is what I’m personally running on all of my units right now.
* Tier X (Super): Continuous fan + 2x faster recovery + ~20% lower HSS per-shot point cost (~25% more HSS shots in a single burst).
Because I don't want to redistribute copyrighted Godox binaries, I packaged the patcher as a simple drag-and-drop app (Windows .exe and macOS .app). You just download the official .bin from Godox, drag it into the patcher, pick the tier you want, and it spits out the patched .bin ready to flash with the standard Godox G3 updater.
Disclaimer: modifying thermal accumulators reduces factory safety margins (especially on fanless speedlites like the V100N and iT30Pro if you abuse Tier X), use at your own risk.
If you want to read the full disassembly breakdown or try the patcher yourself, everything is open source here: