Good Evening

Been a few days since I last updated. A whole bunch of real life and some work projects showed up this week. I’m multitasking even as I write this post.

The GoPro cameras and extended batteries shipped from New York last week and arrived on Friday but they arrived during the workday and a signature was required at home. UPS made arrangements and I got to unbox them last night.

I’m going to have to come up with visual markings on the exterior to tell the identical cameras apart during testing and installation before flight. I could be geeky and call them names like ‘Azimuth’ and ‘Elevation’ OR I could be fun and call them ‘Waylon’ and ‘Willie’ or ‘Pancho’ and ‘Lefty’. THESE are the tough decisions we face.

Testing today – baseline ‘room temp’ battery test

I wanted to establish a standard battery time for the actual flight articles. I put them both on identical chargers overnight and configured them through the wireless app. We we will disable the wireless on launch day because there is no use and it’s a battery drain. For the sake of set up and configuration though, the iPhone app is awesome.

Both cameras lasted for 3.5 hours [+/- 5 minutes] at room temperature capturing HD 1080P video at 60 frames/sec.

This 3.5 hour video is actually broken up into 16x ‘chapter’ files to be seamlessly reassembled later. HERO3 cameras divide chapters like this so that in the event of a jolt or firmware crash that causes a file to become corrupted, only a portion of the video will have become corrupted and you won’t lose the whole thing.

We had one little ‘issue’ in the test. I was left having to infer the recording length based on the time-stamp of the last file written in the directory.

For some reason an app on my work computer overrode a lock I set to keep my screen saver from launching. About 2.5 hours into the test I lost footage of the timer and started capturing the screen saver instead. There is about 1 hour of my iTunes screensaver on the recoding.

See the :30sec video below of my work computer being used as a timer. I like the blinking clock from the freezer test better honestly; that one is foolproof. We still can read the battery life/capture length based on the timestamps below. I’ll rig up a second test tomorrow and hope for similar results.

*Yes. That is an Oscar Meyer wiener whistle on my desk and I do have Kerbal Space Program on my ‘dock’