This tinkerer built his own 18650-powered DIY battery grip for his Canon EOS M

If there’s one annoying aspect of cameras, particularly mirrorless cameras that are constantly powering an LCD or EVF the whole time they’re turned on, it’s battery life. There are grips you can get for some cameras to let you take advantage of multiple batteries or you can go with external power, but not all cameras.

Frustrated with battery life, a tinkerer going by the name “funkster“, decided that the most practical option for his Canon EOS M mirrorless camera was to build his own grip. It lets him use a pair of commonly available 18650 batteries and he even made them hot-swappable so that he can replace one of the batteries when it gets low without the camera losing power.

The grip itself is 3D printed and holds a pair of 18650 batteries. It also features an OLED display on the back to let him immediately see the capacity left in either battery at a glance. As well as the video above, Funkster details more of the construction on his website. He explains how everything’s wired up and the slight modification he had to make to his EOS M camera in order to make it all work. He didn’t have to make the modification, but it did make things much neater as there aren’t wires trailing all over the place.

It’s a very cool idea, and considering the EOS M can shoot 5K RAW video (with the assistance of Magic Lantern), it’s still a moderately relevant camera for those on a super low budget – you can find it used for around $150 these days. Unfortunately, funkster doesn’t seem to have made the STL files available to download if you want to give this build a go with your own EOS M, so you’ll have to design your own, but he does provide the info to help you with the electronics.

[via Hackaday]