DIY GoPro BLE Remote Using ESP32

Background

Back in 2020, I published a project to make a Wi-Fi camera remote out of my favorite dev board; WeMos D1 Mini. That project won a Most Practical award in 2020 China-US Young Maker Competition. If you're not familiar with that project, don't worry, this one is similar. It is also similar to another project but with a more commonly used board which is ESP32.

Hardware:

The bad news: I lost my GoPro Hero 3 in a tragic skydiving accident.

The good news: I got a GoPro Hero 8 instead.

The better news: GoPro saved battery power by shifting some tasks to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) instead of Wi-Fi. That is another reason to use ESP32.

Which means ESP32S2 will not work; don't ask me how I found out.

Keeping It Real:

Speaking of which, as of today, we can only get ESP32 to work properly. ESP32C3 and ESP32S3 have pairing issues. Have not tried ESP32C6.

If you notice in the Cover Image above we have a swelling battery. That probably happened because we wired a vape pen battery directly to 5 V even though we could have used the charger that came with it as we did in Controlling PIXMOB Waveband with WeMos D1 Mini and CC1101 - Hackster.io. Being lazy can be dangerous. Should've listened to Big Clive.

Software:

The most important part of the code is

ThisDevice->setEncryptionLevel(ESP_BLE_SEC_ENCRYPT);

We've seen many makers get stuck on this crucial step in GoPro BLE paring.

In this project we referred to Open GoPro to find out how to communicate with the camera. That page did not tell the whole story, but it was a great place to start. Hero 8 is not one of the supported cameras, but it works. We may even be able to make it work with Hero 7.

To demonstrate is easier than to articulate...

Demo:

This video starts with turning GoPro on then make it ready to pair. We then turn the remote on and click record button. Recording will start immediately after completing the paring process. Once we're done recording, we can stop recording and turn the GoPro off with a single record button press. From that point on, if we need to record, we can do that by clicking record button since we already paired.