Thursday 10 April 2014


 Back-Bone Rib Cage modified 3+





This is my modified GoPro 3+ fitted with a C mount 8-50mm zoom lens with manual iris. The lens is cheap, and designed for surveillance cameras, despite this it produces pretty decent results, however it is a pig to focus almost 3K images on the bacpac screen - so I intend to fit a 3.6 mm distortion free wide angle lens to this one, set the flange back and I'm good to go.

with Canon J6X12

Ripping the GoPro to bits and rebuilding is not for the faint hearted, but Back-Bone produce videos and a comprehensive pdf to help you along.


Monday 7 April 2014


GoPro v2.0 firmware Update - NO!!!!


If like me you were excited to see GoPro's release notes for the Hero 3+ which included things like manageable iso settings!! better control of detail settings and so on, you, like me probably rushed to install.

Great, start testing - high quality HDMI output showed the advantage of setting the iso max to 400 - reduced noise in darker settings - all good - so I started to shoot a few tests.

Upshot is that suddenly, without investing in Sandisk Extreme cards at $90 for 64gb you lose the 46mbs data record rate accross the board so the beautiful 2.7K wide images become noisy and display encoding artifacts - you are stuck with 35 mbs because the firmware now detects your card type and throttles accordingly.

Also I have trouble resolving the same exposure/colour/detail as with the 1.04 firmware - despite trying every combination of set-up available in the now extensive Protune settings list.

I spoke at length to GoPro engineering who say "tough shit buddy - you're stuck with it, and we do not offer a roll-back service."

I decided today to roll-back my camera or break it in the attempt.

visit: 

 and download the version 1.04 drivers. Unpack and delete all files (3) marked with .10 suffix. Place the 3 files with .11 suffix in a folder called UDATE and place this folder on a clean micro sd card. 

These are the files that should be in the UPDATE folder:
HD3.11-firmware.bin
update.11.txt
WF3.11-app.bin

Place a newly charged battery in you 3+, insert the sd card with the UPDATE folder and turn on the GoPro. Wait for it to finish update and voila, you are returned to lovely version 1.04.

I take NO RESPONSIBILTY if your camera is damaged in ANY way using the above procedure.