If you are using GoPro for time lapse shooting this is something you are going to appreciate. I am not really sure if it deserves the ‘firmware hack’ tag, since it looks like a built in feature, yet, this is a clever use that goes all the way to the good old DOS days.

Think hard, what was the first DOS program you ever wrote, I bet it was a two liner: the first line writes your name, the second is goto line 1. Right?

Konrad Iturbe used that ancient DOS kong-fu to create a clever way to extend the intervals offered by GoPro cameras. The GoPro originally supports 0.5, 1, 2, 5, 10, 30 or 60 seconds intervals for time lapse, but Konra’d clever program extends this interval to whatever time you want, allowing multi-days timelapses.

The program looks like this:

sleep 1

t app appmode photo

sleep X

t app button shutter PR

d:\autoexec.ash

REBOOT yes

Looks familiar right? That last line is a call to that same program, and the following line (the one that reboots) is a fail-safe mechanism.

The secret in the execution is the fact that GoPro camera recognize autoexec.ash files and executes them in a similar fashion to the way autoexec.bat used to run on DOS based systems – i.e. the first thing to run after the system boot.

Sleep X – mean sleep for a certain amount of seconds – you can write your own X.

The movie bellow shows how a shot is taken after two minutes but it may be more interesting to see the movie afterwards which is an 8 days time lapse with 3 minutes between each capture.

[MegaLapse via ISO 1200 Magazine]