Copper Bling Keeps Camera Chill

September 25, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

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. Continue reading “Copper Bling Keeps Camera Chill” →

Reverse Engineering The Web API Of An Akaso EK7000 Action Camera

September 8, 2024 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Recently, [Richard Audette] bought an Akaso EK7000 action camera for his daughter’s no-smartphones-allowed summer camp, which meant that after his daughter returned from said camp, he was free to tinker with this new toy. Although he was not interested in peeling open the camera to ogle its innards, [Richard] was very much into using the WiFi-based remote control without being forced into using the ‘Akaso Go’ smartphone app. To do this, he had to figure out the details of what the Android app does so that it could be replicated. He provided a fake camera WiFi hotspot for the app in order to learn its secrets.

Normally, the camera creates a WiFi hotspot with a specific SSID (iCam-AKASO_C_1e96) and password (1234567890) which the Android app connects to before contacting the camera’s IP address at 192.72.1.1. The app then shows a live view and allows you to copy over snapshots and videos. Initially, [Richard] tried to decompile the Android app using JADX, but the decompiled code contained so many URLs that it was hard to make heads or tails of it. In addition, the app supports many different Akaso camera models, making it harder to focus on the part for this particular camera.

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RC Car Becomes Cable Cam

July 19, 2020 by Al Williams 6 Comments

The prevalence of drones has made airborne photography much more widespread, especially among hobby photographers and videographers. However, drone photos aren’t without their problems. You have to deal with making the drone follow the shot which can be difficult unless you have a very expensive one. Worse, you can’t really fly a drone through heavily wooded or otherwise obstructed terrain.

[Makesome’s] friend faced these issues and wanted to buy a cable cam — a mount for the camera that could go back and forth on a cable strung between two trees or other structures. Instead of a design from scratch, they decided to cannibalize a cheap RC car along with an HP printer and the effect — as you can see in the video below — is pretty good.

Repurposing toys is an honored tradition and, after all, what do you need but a motor that goes forward and reverses? We can’t help but notice though that toy hacking is much easier now that you can 3D print custom widgets to connect everything together.

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External Battery Mod For Action Camera Does It Non-destructively

June 9, 2020 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

[Facelesstech] owns an SJCAM SJ4000 action camera, but the internal battery was no longer functional. Not wishing to buy a replacement and unwilling to hook up an ungainly USB cable to feed power, the solution was to design and 3D print an adapter to power the camera from a single rechargeable 14500 sized battery (which is the same size as an AA cell, and a good match for the width of the camera.)

The adapter works by mimicking the original battery, so the camera never knows the difference. A 3D-printed holder for the 14500 battery (which doubles as a GoPro compatible mount) has an extension the same size and shape of the camera’s original internal battery. The tricky part was interfacing to the power connectors buried inside the camera’s battery bay. For a solution, [Facelesstech] eventually settled on the small connectors harvested from inside a female header, using them to connect to the small blades inside the camera. We broke open a spare female 0.1″ header, shown here, to make it clear where these little pieces come from. The only other battery hardware needed are the contacts for an AA cell, but those are also easy to harvest and reuse.

The GitHub repository for the project includes STL files as well as the FreeCAD files for the parts. A video overview is embedded below.

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Hacking An External Mic Port Onto A Camera

May 31, 2017 by John Baichtal 19 Comments

A sub-$100 camera competing in the 4K market, the Akaso EK7000 has a few features typical for the range: wifi, 12MP photos at 30 frames per second, and the like. [Foxx D’Gamma] wanted to add an external mic jack to his camera, replacing the internal mic, which featured poor sound pickup due to being buried in the heart of the camera. [Foxx] spent a considerable amount of effort getting the enclosure apart, working gingerly to avoid damaging the display’s ribbon cable, which can’t be disconnected. He also had to deal with the button covers falling out when the case was opened.

[Foxx] desoldered the button mic and added the jack’s wires, and the next challenge presented itself: getting it back together again with the mic port looking good. He had to make sure the jack projected just the right amount from the housing, to ensure the external mic could plug in. Check out both videos below the break.

We’ve featured several cheap camera hacks recently on Hackaday: the ruggedized cheap camera, the cheap 360 degree camera, and the full-spectrum camera all come to mind. It’s a fertile field for not a lot of money!

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The Raspberry Pi Action Camera

April 25, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 23 Comments

Action cameras like the GoPro, and the Sony Action Cam are invaluable tools for cyclists and anyone else venturing into the great outdoors. These cameras are not really modifiable or usable in any way except for what they were designed for. [Connor] wanted a cheaper, open-source action camera and decided to build one with the Raspberry Pi.

[Connor]’s Pi action cam is built around the Raspberry Pi Model A+ and the Pi camera. This isn’t a complete solution, so [Connor] added a bluetooth module, a 2000 mAh battery, and a LiPo charger.

To keep the Pi Action Cam out of the elements, [Connor] printed an enclosure. It took a few tries, but eventually he was able to mount everything inside a small plastic box with buttons to start and stop recording, a power switch, and a USB micro jack for charging the battery. The software is a script by [Alex Eames], and the few changes necessary to make this script work with the hardware are also documented.

This was the most intensive 3D printing project [Connor] has ever come up with, and judging by the number of prints that don’t work quite right, he put a lot of work into it. Right now, the Pi action cam works, but there’s still a lot of work to turn this little plastic box into a completed project.