Reviving a Flat Bubl Camera
I, like many others, backed the Bubl 360 camera on Kickstarter and after being delayed a couple of years, they finally delivered to the backers a great little ball with 4 cameras and a decent app with online sharing service. It seems that they’ve since struggled to find further financial backing and now you can’t buy a Bubl or get support for them.
This leads to a bit of a problem: the camera will brick itself if you let it fully discharge. It seems that the internals need a little charge to know they need charging. I mostly use mine for ski videos, so in the off season it went flat :( ruh roh.
As the company is pretty much defunct, and I didn’t want to ship it from New Zealand back to the US anyway, I thought I’d take a look inside and see what could be done about getting it going again. The battery is listed in their specs as a 3.7v Lipo, so I thought I’d try a USB 3.7v Lipo Charger, which are only a buck or two on dx, ebay or Aliexpress, and put some charge into the flat battery.
TLDR: It works! Order something like this, solder or clip it onto the battery in your camera, give it some angry pixies and you’re back in business (unlike the Bubl company).
This search should help: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=3.7v+li-ion+battery+charging.TRS0&_nkw=3.7v+li-ion+battery+charging
If you need a little help, there’s three screws on the bottom of the camera; removing them loosens the bottom panel, but it takes a bit of levering to get the panel free. Once it’s removed the other panels come off easily — it’s not really necessary, but it’s interesting to have a look at how nicely this camera is built.
The battery is really two cells in parallel. The very middle terminals that have red and black wires are the ones you want to attach to the charger (+ output on the charger to Red).
The charger I bought has a red light while charging, that changes to blue when it’s fully charged. Even after a little charge the camera now powers on again and works fine. You can desolder the added wires once there’s some charge in the camera.
After a full charge via this circuit and using it for a while to run it down, I am able to charge it again via the standard USB connection. It really does just seem that a design flaw bricks the charging circuit when there’s no charge in the camera.
I hope this helps some people out there that have a flat Bubl.