Any luck with chinese GoPro knock-offs?

Contributing and equipment
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Hello there,

There are a lot of somewhat cheap chinese GoPro knock-offs around there, so has anybody tried any of them and could give some feedback on the camera tested ?

I’ve stumbled upon the Soocoo S200 for example which seems to be a fair deal. I especially like the external GPS, that lets you put the GPS receiver on a spot where it will have a clear line of sight.

So is anyone using that type of camera and has recommendations or feedback on how fit it is to use for Mapillary ?

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would be interesting to see if this has interval capture, whether it can run plugged in and not melt down.

3

I use the basic xiaoyi action camera. Not 4k+ or lite or discovery. just the plain YI Action Camera
The interval shooting at 1second locks the exposure, but I put a script file on the memory stick that fixes this.**

It doesn’t have in built gps, but i just use my phone and foto geotag afterwards.

I managed to buy 3 at £35 each from amazon in February… As i’m not using them for video, i find that excellent value.

** this is why i like them actually. They’re very hackable - if you like that sort of thing. I may get all three controlled over wifi by a raspberry pi or something so to synchronise shooting at some point…

4

I also found that one : https://www.gitup.com/home/76-gitup-g3-duo-fov-170-pro-packing.html . Claims 3h of battery time, external GPS, 12MP photos, timelapses with interval down to 0.5s.

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@Gness Yes I’m very much into that (I’m an embedded systems engineer), do you have maybe a Github or some resources about what you’ve done ?

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I’ve yet to really get stuck into it, but the cameras have a linux subsystem on them that expose a web server and ways to prod the camera into doing stuff.
nutseynuts: Xiaomi Yi action cam custom scripts. has a bunch of scripts to give examples.

By default, the camera hosts a wifi access point, expecting your phone to connect to it. There’s scripts available (like here: Camera WiFi in Client mode - WORKING .ash SCRIPT inside | DashCamTalk )that make the camera connect to a wifi access point. From this point, it may be possible to simultaneously(or near enough) send commands to multiple cameras on the same network.

Thus far, I’ve only used the following script in a file called autoexec.ash, that consistently yields a photo every 2 seconds, despite the 1 second sleep:

sleep 10
while true
do
t app key shutter
sleep 1
done

As I typically walk whilst capturing, this frequency is sufficient, although I may experiment and see if it can reliable manage 1fps to match my phone.

7

Could you please share your script for 1s timelapse?
I am currently shooting @2sec intervals just bacause of this weird AE lock issue.

I found this:

but I wonder if AE could be unlocked somehow with native AE 1s TL mode?
Also would be interesting to know if 1s intervals are precise when using such a ‘shutter loop’ workaround?

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