Your LED will always be lit, those power connections always have power when a battery is connected or when external (USB) power is supplied. Unless I missed it, there is still no way to see if the camera is recording because the front LED does not come out to the back of the camera (or we haven't found it yet).

One thing you can do is get a small LCD and use the live video with overlay, pretty sure this tells you if you are recording or not.

Also the switch you need is called normally open, also often shown as off-(on) on the electric component sites. The (on) means it is momentary as opposed to just plain on which means it will remain in that state. For rocker switches you can often go with an on-(on) or off-(on) or sometimes shown as on-none-(on) and just find the two terminals that get connected for the momentary contact.

I think you need to pull another pin low to make the audio input work, but I haven't looked at the information presented earlier long enough to tell you with any certainty.

All this stuff is on my list when I get time to make some cables and do some testing.

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the help and Feedback

You wrote

Your LED will always be lit, those power connections always have power when a battery is connected

Are you 100% sure?

Looking at an earlier post on this thread its says

ADAPTER - looks like this is power output to feed external adapters (such as LCD). Voltage on those pins (doubled for more current) follows battery voltage during usage and is turned on/off toogether with camera by (most probably) some transistor key;

The part

and is turned on/off toogether with camera

suggests this would drive the LED as I require. ie. If Pin 12 Pwr/Mode is grounded for 3 secs (ie. Press and hold the power button for 3 seconds to stop recording and turn the camera off) the camera will turn off and the +ve voltage at pin Pin 23 Adaptor (Battery Out) will go to 0v

You wrote

I think you need to pull another pin low to make the audio input work

I'd be really be interested in hearing from anyone who has worked out this. I'm guessing this might be part of the function of ID1-ID4 ???

I'll have to check it and see what is going on. You may be right and I'm thinking of a different pin. I may play with this a little this weekend. Alternate to this there are several pins that definitely only have power when the camera is turned on and are normally used by pulling them down to ground to do things like tell the camera there is a video connector plugged into the side. You could use one of these pins to switch a transistor that turns the LED on.

I asked the GoPro Support about the 3D kit for single images and got this answer:

The 3D system will also snap photos in 3D.
We cannot disclose any additional details at this time.

So there must be a way to trigger the second camera.
But we still don't know if a new firmware is necessary or not.

Judging from this image the two plugs seem to be asymmetrically wired, or they wouldn't label them.


Hope there is no microcontroller in the cable.

I am on the pre-release list for the 3D kit and will tell my findings a soon as I receive it.
Whenever that might be.

Jan


My question was:

Dear Sirs,

just noticed the new catalog at
http://www.goprocamera.com/files/GoProCatalog.pdf

I wonder if the 3D Hero System works for still images too?
Or video only?

Of special interest is the quality of the synchronisation to me.
I soldered wires to the release buttons of 2 of my GoPro HDs, but noticed that they do not release at the exact same time when taking still images.

What is the quality of the synchronisation?
How many milliseconds?

I point one camera forward, and one backward, this seems to make the synchronisation issue worse due to the different lightning.

Will this problem be solved with the 3D System?
Will there be a new firmware for the 3D system?

Jan,

You wrote

So there must be a way to trigger the second camera

is this not perhaps the function of the TRIG signal on pin 17 ?

Pin 17 TRIG - and here is the devil - since the beginning I thought this is external shutter or something similar. Recent findings revealed that this is digital output. It does nothing in video mode, but goes down as soon as first photo is taken (in all photo modes) and stays down untill mode is changed back to video or camera is turned off/on. A bit strange function, for me more usefull could be short pulse down after each picture or something similar

It would make sence I guess?

There is more to 3D than just telling both cameras to start recording at the same time. My guess is that the use a data path to tell the second camera to record, and they also sync the frames rates so that while one camera is not sampling the sensor the other camera is sampling the sensor. There is a left right "flicker" in 3D which is why pretty much all of the decent 3D displays are 240hz refresh, 120 hz is left picture, 120 hz is right picture and they interleave. I would expect that it is much easier to deal with the 3D images if they are also interleaved at capture, but I could be wrong.

I do n=know that shorting pin 17 to ground did nothing for me when I tried it. In photo mode it might be useful to try and pull that pin up to 3.3 volts to see if it cause a picture to be taken. Most of my desires have been with the video side, haven't really taken more than about 2 stills just to see what the camera works like since I bought it over a year ago.

Success!!!

I've got my GoPro HD working with a remote control, with LED status feedback and also with remote audio...all via the GoPro HD hero bus!!

Using a push button momentary switch and a LED i can remotely turn the GoPro on/off and see that status remotely via the LED. Using the single button record mode I can effectively stop/start recording remotely, with a LED confirmation.

Using an external audio source (in this case the headphone output of an ipod for test purposes) I can feed the GoPro with an external microphone etc for better sound quality.

ID4 on Pin 22 seems to be the enabler for audio inputs (I first tried feeding audio in as standard, and got no external audio, as soon as i used ID4 it all worked)

Pins used;

Pin 30 - GND
Pin 23 - Adaptor - this pin goes high when the gopro is switched on and i used this to drive a LED, taken to pin 30 GND, via a 150 ohm resistor
Pin 22 - ID4 - I wired this pin straight to GND on pin 30
Pin 14 - Audio in R - I fed this pin directly from an ipod headphone output for test purposes, but will use an external active microphone.
Pin 12 - PWR/MODE - I took this pin to GND via a push-to-close push button switch. ie. when shorted to GND for approx 1 second it turns the camera on or off, or if in single button record mode it stops/starts video recording.

The audio quality is ok. The sound certainly isn't Hi-Fi quality and is a bit 'tinny' suggesting there isn't a decent audio bandwidth being used on the mp4, but the music I recorded was clear, undistorted and without pops/crackles. I'm guessing that fed from a reasonable electret remote mic, positioned ok, the audio quality will far exceed that of the GoPro internal mic.

I now need to see what the optimum audio level is, to feed the GoPro with, from an external active microphone.

Can you please set it to "P" = single photo and test if it works too?
What is the shortest time between images yo can do?
1 second? 2 seconds?

Thanks,
Jan

He is using single button record mode, so effectively turning the camera on and off to make this stuff work.

Hi Greg,

the manual says:

CHOOSING ONE BUTTON MODE ON / OFF
“One Button Mode On” forces the camera to automatically begin recording video or photos once the camera
is turned on, depending on which default power up mode the camera is set to...

So I guess the camera will take a single image when set to "P"?