141–150 of 309 posts
This looks really cool. I've made my living a photographer for over 30 years and I'm very tempted to purchase. This small form factor would be perfect for a project I'm doing documenting California condors rearing their young. Sadly, I would also need it to shoot video to be effective for my needs (and I'm sure this would kill the battery). Its one of these situations where I setup the camera system in November, and…
Cool project, here's a few comments after a quick glance over: - There's no license on the code and design files in the Github repo, thus this currently isn't open source but rather "source-available". If you plan to allow others to modify the code and build their own cameras you should add an appropriate license. - The Mac only support (and it's MacOS only, with no iPad/iPhone support) with a dedicated app to operat…
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Not the OP, but my understanding (admittedly a few years outdated) is that an MSP430 will, in idle, with sleep states properly set up and low power modes in use, drain a coin cell battery (e.g. CR2032) over a period of years - with the current drawn around 1.5 uA in standby and 0.1uA in RAM retention idle. That is likely even lower than the effective self discharge rate of a lithium coin cell battery. I don't believe…
> That is likely even lower than the effective self discharge rate of a lithium coin cell battery. That's what I've found too. Based on my measurements and calculations, Photon uses 5µA (MSP430 + motion sensor) while sleeping, while the battery's self-discharge is more like 80µA. That's probably a good argument for using a more powerful chip though, if the battery self-discharge is that high, hah.
I kind of wonder, is it going to hurt aesthetics too much to replace the lens mount with a transparent window, with the lens mounted to the board and PIR sensor off a short cable, so the front face would require less machining and that the board can be secured to the bottom plate? That would save machining time and also might allow use of customizing options on existing enclosures, if it would make sense to do so.
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It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly! Personally I think you should keep the focus on a polished mac app. For other platforms you can do just the bare minimum with a web app that uses WebUSB. People will bitch that it's Chromium only but, I mean, chromium has 95% market share outside Apple world (and I say this as a FF user). A hardware solution could be to add a cheap microcontroller that woul…
>It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly! SD cards aren't really black magic since they "speak" SPI, meaning people have been interfacing basic microcontrollers to them since forever.
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To be frank the "mac exclusive" marketing is a huge turn off for something that should obviously be nearly completely agnostic regarding PC operating systems. Makes me wonder what other poor decisions went into the design of this thing.
> should obviously be nearly completely agnostic Is it obvious? Is it free (as in resources) to support agnostic platforms and systems? Is the threshold for making anything that it needs to be compatible with everything?
However a security camera that works with all operating systems just needs to expose a drive via USB… as has been done for decades now.
Just “camera” implies I might take this to the colosseum or to take family photos.
But without a view finder and with deleting old photos I don’t think that is the use case.
It is super niche though. Most security cam buyers would at least want cellular or wifi to capture the images “so far” before the thief steals the cam itself.
So this is for situations where small is the main thing, I suppose almost for spying.
I would market it as a security camera. Just “camera” implies I might take this to the colosseum or to take family photos. But without a view finder and with deleting old photos I don’t think that is the use case. It is super niche though. Most security cam buyers would at least want cellular or wifi to capture the images “so far” before the thief steals the cam itself. So this is for situations where small is the ma…
I have been in the market for something like this forever for security cameras near sheds I have on properties I check on once every couple of months
First time that I’ll be buying something of hacker news this quickly