We were setting up our GoPro on the jobsite and shooting time-lapse. But what we found was that we'd get about two hours out of the batties on it, and then it would cut out.
It gets tough during the day in your normal workflow to remember "Oh, I have to go change the GoPro battery..." because it is usually just sitting off in the corner somewhere and you're not really paying any attention to is.
So I got frustrated by not catching the stuff we wanted or stopping the guys so I could grab batteries out of the trailer and swap them out, so I came up with a little solution.
I took a little Dremel tool and Dremeled out the side of one of my cases, where the charger port is, nothing fancy. I plug the charger cord in and then we picked up one of these USB charger packs from Makita and one of our 18V batteries clips right on here, and powers out.
We get all of the runtime that we need, in fact, we get a substantial amount of runtime.
I made the mistake of forgetting to shut this off on a Friday afternoon when we put it back in the trailer and I manages to shoot about sixty hours of black trailer until I showed up on Monday morning and captured the last few frames of me going "Oh my God, it's still on."
So definitely if you're having issues with the runtime on a camera, this is a quick hack.
—This camera hack comes from Ben Bogie, the remodeler who undertook the 2017 Model Remodel project in Woodbury, CT. Watch the progress weekly on the Model Remodel Show.