Madman Solders Massive Copper Heat Sink to Insta360 Camera: ‘I Dare You to Overheat Now’
Overheating cameras are nothing new, especially as cameras get more powerful and offer more demanding, higher-quality video features. However, how each camera maker deals with this issue varies dramatically. And sometimes, customers themselves need to step up and develop a solution.
Some have opted for water-cooling solutions, like this creator did for his Canon EOS R5, a camera notorious for its overheating issues. Others have gone for large add-on heatsinks, which are often the weapon of choice for camera manufacturers themselves. YouTube creator Zach Tong, who goes by the channel name Breaking Taps, opted for the latter solution to keep his Insta360 camera from overheating. Specifically, Tong says he “over-engineered a giant heatsink.”
As spotted by Hackaday, it’s a clever, robust design that proved effective.
“This is a new camera that I picked up recently. It’s an Insta360, and it captures footage on both sides of the camera in a 360-degree pattern. The idea is that I want to use this for interviews so I can capture the subject and scenery as well as myself without needing to take along a film crew with me,” Breaking Taps explains. “But there’s a fatal flaw to these cameras, and it’s that if you use both sides at 4K resolution, they overheat pretty quickly. You get 20 or 30 minutes out of it before you need to shut it down and let it cool down.”
To solve the issue, Tong made a custom L-shaped copper heatsink, milled to fit snugly against the Insta360’s slightly curved body, and attached it to the camera where the device’s built-in aluminum heatsink is located using a boron nitride paste.
Per Tong, his heatsink-equipped Insta360 camera can record dual 4K video for about six times longer than before, ensuring that it stays cool for about two hours of continuous recording, which is more than the camera’s battery can even support. That’s quite an improvement.
As Hackaday and Tong rightly note, the design limits the Insta360’s utility as a full-blown action camera — it’s pretty bulky now, after all — but it makes it perfect for his needs.
Image credits: Featured image is a screenshot from Zachary Tong’s video on his Breaking Taps YouTube channel.
