Here at Kolari Vision, we love tearing into the newest camera gears to learn how they work and if they can be modded for infrared photography, full spectrum photography, or other things. We’ve been really excited about the R5/R6 release, and had plans to add some cooling mods and overhaul it into a proper video camera.
Reports from EOSHD that Canon uses an overheat timer rather than actual temperature readings left us a bit disappointed and calls into question whether physically cooling down the camera can actually give any more shooting time. Andrew Reid was able to bypass this timer by using a screw to override the safety shutoff switch in the battery door compartment and do a hard shutdown during recording, but this seems to corrupt video files.
“Math Class” on Baidu recently showed that removing the clock battery can also bypass this timer. Firmware update by Canon on the R5 has also recently extended the shooting length by a seemingly arbitrary time, showing that software can absolutely affects shutdown times. These data so far suggest that the camera keeps internal time, keeps time when the camera is off, and uses these values to influence if shooting can resume. A hard shutdown corrupts some data being written, preventing a time limit from being established. The clock battery removal suggests that without a clock keeping time while the camera is off, there is no way to establish a countdown timer, and the camera defaults to zero on the shooting time. With this knowledge, we wanted to investigate how the camera functions without a clock battery, could we identify a physical clock chip on the board, and is there a more advanced modification that could be made to interrupt the clock timer communication without affecting date/time settings. Right now we only have the R6 to work with, but we suspect the R5 works similarly. If anyone has an R5, please contact us.
So first, let’s start with the clock battery. It can be found on the back of the main circuit board.
The first thing we wanted to check was, how does missing the battery affect general performance? The clock is of course reset, but on other Canon cameras it has prevented saving shooting settings and custom settings, which would be deal breaker. So we set some custom menus, changed some shooting values, and some menu settings, and then proceeded to remove the clock battery. Leaving the board completely powered off without any battery source for about 30 minutes, we re-assembled the camera sans battery and checked it out. We received the expected prompt for time/date, but were pleasantly surprised to find the rest of our settings were still there. Nice! We also found that the camera keeps time as long as the main battery is in place, even when turned off.
Next up, could we trace out where the battery leads connect to. Visually checking, the leads from the battery immediately go down into the board to a middle layer, so we could not visually trace them out. Oh well, we have a multimeter! Running a continuity check from the leads, I was able to trace the right lead to the common ground right away. The left positive lead was a bit harder, but the trace must come out somewhere, so I went around testing components throughout the board on both sides. A bit tedious, but I was able to identify only one chip that the battery feeds into.
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