Cooling the Gear 360

with forced air requires powering it externally.

It was crazy hard to make this camera take power from the pocketjuice. The cable had to be under 6ft or it would shut down. Only speaker cable had low enough impedance. The fan cable is still a 4 conductor phone cord with 2 unused conductors from earlier in the day. The cooling system seemed only marginally effective. It hit 36C with forced air & the low 40's without forced air. It hit 56C in a hotter part of the day without forced air, but wasn't directly measured with forced air.

It might work better with the fan blowing perpendicular to the battery compartment instead of angled. This gives air an escape path. The cooling system was rebuilt twice to make it not appear in the frames.



It was fortunate to spend the extra money on an 8Ah battery with 3.4A rating over USB. When derated to reality, it's probably barely enough to feed the camera's 1A & fan's .2A.





The next outdoor test had better focus only in the exact center, but still was horrendous near the edges. It might require removing material. Another possibility is buying another camera for a lot less money & interchanging parts or just getting version 2 & not bothering with 30 megapixels. Because neither camera is anywhere near ideal, it's a lot of fuss over nothing. The quality is just barely acceptable for 1920x1080.


Forced air cooling worked. The cooling system didn't get in the shot or cause camera shake. The 2 frames could be merged without defishing. It would contain a lot more information than if the blurriest areas were expanded & the sharpest areas were shrunk.

There was no image stabilization in photo mode. It got stuck waiting 4 seconds for the UHS 1 card, every few frames. The question then becomes why not make a 4k video instead of bothering with the intervalometer to get 30 blurry megapixels every 1-4 seconds?





Tested the solar filter, finally. Focusing requires exposure compensation all the way down to -5. White balance must be set to 1700k. Exposure compensation must be -2. It gets dimmer near the center. Because it's never white, either red or blue always blows out when it's brighter. All the settings are lost when it's powered down.


Video crop mode is required on the t4i, which makes automatic tracking not work, but there is barely enough room to let it drift for 150 seconds.