This is my Toaks 650 cook kit setup. I made the pot stand myself so that it would fit inside of the mug. Toaks do sell one too but total cost with shipping to Sweden is too high and this thing is basically the same.
The setup
Toaks 650 pot
Trail Designs 12-10 alcohol stove
Trail Designs Measuring cup
DIY pot stand
Fire steel
Bic lighter (rarely use it)
Sponge for cleaning
DIY Pot cozy
Titanium windscreen
Bamboo spoon (missing in the video)
The weight of this kit is ca 220g and packs down small. The windscreen and the spoon doesn’t fit inside of the mug like the rest of the kit but that’s not a problem for me.
This is what it looks like all setup
Why the fire steel?
The reason I carry a fire steel and not only a lighter is because a couple of years a go my Bic lighter died on me. It was the second day into my 7 day trip and some pretty nasty weather decided to show up in the morning. I had my lighter inside the backpacks hip pocket which is mostly waterproof apart from the zipper. Water came in and soaked the lighter and it wouldn’t start up again for the whole week. Luckily I’d packed my fire steel, actually almost forgot it at home, and from this day I don’t go out on a trip without it.
However I don’t just leave the lighter at home because it’s quite hard to light for example a candle with fire steel…
Having a GoPro Hero3+ Black and comparing it to my Contour cameras the audio out of the box is anything but good. Quite sad as the camera otherwise is great…
As I want to use it for when I’m out and about I needed a solution for audio that meant not bringing something big and bulky like my Rode Videomic Pro. I Googled a lot and found this small mic from Edutige, ETM-001. The mic is omni directional which means that it’ll pick up audio basically from all directions. And it’s a stereo mic. Some will probably argue that it’s better with a shotgun-like microphone as the audio is only picked up from the direction that the mic is facing, hence removing a lot of background noice. And there are microphones for that too in the same size as the ETM-001.
As the new GoPro’s don’t have a 3.5mm jack anymore like the Hero2 you need a adapter cable for it to work that connects via mini-USB. I didn’t want the mic to just be hanging from the camera body I needed something to hold it in place. At first my plan was to glue it to the GoPro Frame and/or the waterproof body but then I couldn’t use it stand-alone with the camera or if it breaks you’ll have to replace it and that will be quite hard so that plan went out the window. I tried a few different places before I saw that the USB-adapter had a part that wasn’t flat but rather rounded where the 3.5mm jack could be glued and fixed in to place.
This is the final result! Works like a charm! I want to get a deadcat (windscreen) for the mic too but I guess that will be a problem. I don’t want anything showing up in the bottom left corner of the picture. I haven’t tried every video setting but 1080p works but 2.7k wide shows the windscreen. I guess that if I don’t use it the problem will be solved. However I nearly ever shoot in 2.7k wide other than for timelaps and stuff where I don’t need sound so for me that’s not an issue. If this is not the case for you then this particular mod won’t work. If you place your adapter so that it’s aligned with the USB-plug it won’t be seen in 1080p at least.
Made a short timelaps where you can see the mic in the bottom left corner of the screen in 2.7k wide.
Here’s a short video in 1080p and you can see a little bit of the windscreen at the bottom. So if I just make a small adjustment on the image crop it won’t be there and I won’t be loosing much of the picture anyway. If you make yours so that it’s aligned with the USB-plug you won’t have my issue. I bought 3 of these USB-adapters so if I get annoyed with this I’ll just make a new one. You can find them really cheap on eBay like four dollars a piece, just follow the link above. Make sure to buy the one that’s not a 90 degree angle USB-adaptor because that one is all flat on the USB-plug and gluing the 3.5mm jack to it will be harder, but not impossible.
Looking through all my test footage I can see that I don’t have this issue with the windscreen showing in all my videos. I guess that the windscreen just came of the mic just a little sometimes. But like I suggested, glue it so that it sits aligned with the USB-plug and you’ll be just fine!
Lighter Packs 