GoPro Gear on a Budget

In the end, we were able to complete four different multimedia tools in under $20. They all work well, and are good alternatives to pricier options. Though there were a few things that could have been better, we are overall quite pleased with how everything turned out.

In this video, we show the GoPro chest mount completed, along with a clip from the GoPro itself.

This video demonstrates the GoPro gimbal after completion.

In this video, we demonstrate how the GoPro floater works.

This video shows the GoPro night handle’s function.

As final steps to complete the gimbal/stabilizer, the screws were added to connect the copper wire to the black tubing, and a foam piece was glued onto the handle in order to make it more comfortable. We were a little concerned about whether the camera would be level, but the extra weight of the GoPro seems to help a lot with this, as can be seen in the final photo.

Once the handle dried we drilled a small hole on one of the sides. Then we screwed in a screw (any screw you have). We left it sticking out a tiny bit to give enough room for wire to wrap around it.

Next we took some black paint we had at home and painted our wooden handle.

We then moved on to measuring and drilling hole around the black pipping. We put the 1st holes close to the one edge of the pipping. We then put the 2nd hole across from it in the same spot. We then moved a quarter over from that hole and drilled the 3rd hole closer to the other edge of the piping. After that we drilled the 4th hole across from that in the same spot.

After that we drilled two small holes across from each other. The holes just have to be big enough to fit the copper wire through.

We started by drilling a hole into the centre of the bottle cap. We took a screw and two nuts and placed them in the cap. We put a nut on either side of the bottle cap as seen in the above photos. This will be our GoPro mount.

6.Lastely you will need 4 screws and 2 nuts. (This item is not featured in the above photo)

We decided we wanted to make one more GoPro assesory. We decided to make a GoPro gimbal. We started off by looking around for cylinder materials as seen in the pictures above.

After assembling the bases of the bottle we covered the plastic bottle in patterned tape from Michaels that costed $3.00 to look more appealing.

Today we worked on the chest mount. Since the GoPro wasn’t sitting up high enough, we decided to try and use two foam balls to help support it. We cut a bit off of each of the foam balls so that they had a flat side to glue. Afterwards, we painted them black, as well as the orange plastic that is on the belt. This doesn’t serve an actual purpose, but is more for uniformity. We then glued the two foam balls onto the belt, close to the bottom. We added a little more paint so that it will look a little nicer once on.

We did another quick test with this new water bottle to see if it would float. When we tested it we noticed that some water leaked into the bottle from the hole in the cap. As seen in the pictures above. We fixed this problem by sealing the screw, nut and cap together as seen in the picture above. We made sure we did this carefully so we didn’t get the seal onto the grooves of the inside of the cap. If the seal got onto the grooves in the cap the cap wouldn’t close properly. We used a multipurpose siliconized seal that we found at home. This prevented the water from leaking into the bottle. If You don’t have this seal you could also use hot glue to block the water out.

After we put together the base of the GoPro handle we had to create the mount for the GoPro. We took two nuts, a screw and the water bottle cap to design the mount. First we drilled a small hole into the centre of the cap (large enough to fix the screw perfectly). After we did that we put the screw into the cap. We made sure we put a nut on the inside of the cap and on the outside as seen in the pictures above. We did this to help stabilize and tighten the GoPro as best as we can when fitting the parts together. After we created that mount we took one of the GoPro detachable parts (shown in the pictures above) that comes with the GoPro to attach to the bottle cap mount that we made. We repeated this process again for the other bottle we used to make the GoPro floater.