Every action camera these days seems prone to overheating and sudden shutdowns after mere minutes of continuous operation. It can be a real pain, especially when the only heat problem a photographer might face back in the day was fogged film from storing a camera in a hot car. Then again, the things a digital camera can do while it’s not overheated are pretty amazing compared to analog cameras. Win some, lose some, right?
Maybe not. [Zachary Tong], having recently acquired an Insta360 digital camera, went to extremes to solve its overheating problem with this slick external heat sink project. The camera sports two image sensor assemblies back-to-back with fisheye lenses, allowing it to capture 360° images, but at the cost of rapidly overheating. [Zach]’s teardown revealed a pretty sophisticated thermal design that at least attempts to deal with the excess heat, including an aluminum heat spreader built into the case, which would be the target of the mod.
He attached a custom copper heatsink to a section of the heat spreader, which had been carefully milled flat to provide the best thermal contact. [Zach] used a fancy boron nitride heat transfer paste and attached the heat sink to the spreader with epoxy. A separate aluminum enclosure was bonded to the copper heat sink, giving [Zach] a place to mount his audio sync and timecode recorder and providing extra thermal mass.
Does it help? It sure seems to; where [Zach] was previously getting about twenty minutes before thermal shutdown with both cameras running, the heatsink-adorned rig was able to run about six times longer, with the battery giving out first. True, the heatsink takes away from the original sleek lines of the camera and might make it tough to use while snowboarding or surfing, but it’s still more portable than some external camera heatsinks we’ve seen. And besides, the copper is pretty gorgeous.
“fancy boron nitride heat transfer paste”
I.e. ghost grease?
On the practical for snowboarding (etc) side if you wanted to still use it exactly as if stock I’d be willing to bet with how cool it was running on that heat sink in most climates it would work with just the copper fins added to the camera body section – might not actually be enough in perfectly still air in a small space to record indefinitely, but probably enough to match the battery life. Though that is pure guess as I have no idea what its internal temperature cut off will be etc.
Though in the video its mentioned that actively moving is enough to prevent overheating anyway, so the added copper would at least delay thermal shutdown when using the camera the way that lead to this mod, and won’t harm other use.
It’s only dissipating 3 watts over 20 square centimeters. That fancy Boron Nitride stuff isn’t at all needed.
It would have been simpler and mechanically better to just glue the heatsink on with plain old epoxy or that Loctite.
The temperature difference will be a few hundredths of a degree at most.
But I do have to admire the glorious overkill on the machining!