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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Hands Free Recording – Looks Silly But Is Super Effective

August 19, 2014 by James Hobson 16 Comments

Video goggles

While most hackers probably like to claim they’re good at everything, no one is good at filming one-handed. Setting up a tripod and adjusting it every shot can be tedious — wouldn’t it be great if you could just film what you see?

That’s what inspired [Hans de Bruin] to make these camera goggles. He’s using those big old school safety glasses that you can remove the glass lenses from. From there he traced the outline and 3D printed an adapter that would fit snugly in the glasses while holding up a video camera — He’s using a Chinese version of the GoPro called the SJ4000, but it should fit a real one too.

But wait, you’ll get a headache staring into one pixeley LCD screen! [Hans] also added a biconvex optical lens between his eye and the camera – it’s the same kind used in Google’s Cardboard VR kit.

Sound like a tool you could use? Head on over to Thingiverse to grab the files and print it out!