GoPain

Hot out of the labor camps of Chine, I got my hands on the GoPro Wifi combo kit. The WiFi Bac has been in development for a long time, it was talked about by GoPro many months ago and now finally has made an appearance in retail stores. Some people have been able to get some that were “accidentaly” released by Beast Buy. BB supposedly has an exclusive with GoPro to be the first to sell them so had them ahead of time but were not supposed to sell them before the official date. No worries for GoPro, being perhaps clever the camera requires a significant firmware update so all these people who got them ahead of time had useless little plastic bits with buttons you could press, make symbols on little displays, and plug them into USB ports and make them warm.

However, I found myself a not very happy camper having bought this kit after the official date and spending hours getting software installed, updated, units plugged in, firmware updated, units unplugged, plug other units, update that firmware, not working, rebooting PC, plugging in units again and seeing that it says firmware still needs to be upgraded. Search GoPro’s website to no avail, send a message to their support which will prob take days to be seen, and finally finding a community forum site. The site detailed the non-documented procedure for updating firmware without using the GoPro editing software. That finally did the trick so here we are some three hours later and I finally can remote control my GoPro 2 with the keyfob control.

The kit includes the WiFi Bac that snaps on the back of your GoPro, a WiFi remote fob, 2 extended size case backs, one waterproof the other open to allow air & sound in, a short USB cable, a second USB to keyfob cable, and a short extendion arm mount to allow extra clearance for the extended back. Contruction of parts looks pretty good. Have yet to really use them, but seems it will work well. The smartphone/tablet interface/apps aren’t out yet. When they do they should add some interesting capabilites. Let’s just hope the installation of that won’t be as full of pain as I had with this!

Perhaps I wasn’t licking it right, but this had me feeling like running around yelling “how come I can’t print! How come I can’t print!” Will have to wait a bit to give it a verdict on how it is.