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Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
211–220 of 309 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#212I absolutely love this. Well done !
If I set a camera with 1 picture every 30 minutes, how long would the battery last ? Can I set it up outside, will it take a beating under the sun and rain ?
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#213Does it have a standard tripod mount? Also, maybe for a later iteration, if you could make a case that enables compatibility with GoPro accesories would be plus.
Otherwise, I'm very impressed, it requires a lot of dedication and different abilities to makes something like that!
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#214I absolutely love this. Well done ! If I set a camera with 1 picture every 30 minutes, how long would the battery last ? Can I set it up outside, will it take a beating under the sun and rain ?
All of this is answered in the first 100 words of the website.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#215I absolutely love this. Well done ! If I set a camera with 1 picture every 30 minutes, how long would the battery last ? Can I set it up outside, will it take a beating under the sun and rain ?
The best way to calculate the battery life is in terms of photos. It can take a minimum of 50k photos on a single charge, so 50k photos * 30 minutes == 2.8 years. The battery self-discharge will deplete before that though, so I'd expect 12-24 months.
Note though that the SD card can only fit 20k photos, so the battery typically lasts longer than the SD card, and after that the oldest photos are overwritten!
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#216Does it have a standard tripod mount? Also, maybe for a later iteration, if you could make a case that enables compatibility with GoPro accesories would be plus. Otherwise, I'm very impressed, it requires a lot of dedication and different abilities to makes something like that!
It unfortunately doesn't have a mount. (A friend has been hounding me for months about that...)
I've been using adhesive pads to mount it to things. The Gorilla "mounting tape squares" are strong and don't leave any residue.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#217Hi Dave, nice project!
I'd love to hear more about the low power design. You mentioned going for a MSP430 on here, and the high level architecture blogpost has some infos about the power domains too. But I'd love to see another blog post with some more nitty-gritty powersaving stuff.
I was also wondering... have you thought about adding a simple streaming compression algorithm to increase battery life? Less data to write would mean less time of VDD_B being active. Could maybe even be implemented on the FPGA. I was thinking of something like delta encoding, with two different code lengths for small and big brightness changes (per color channel.
E.g. first bit 0 -> 5 bits of +/-32 brightness delta following. First bit 1, 11 bits of brightness delta.
You'd loose some minimal information if brightness changes by more than 2048 between two pixels, but you could just "smear" that change over two consecutive values (e.g. [0, 0, 4096, 4096, 4096] would end up as [0, 0, 2048, 4096, 4096])
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask why you went with a MSP430? I'm not judging, they were all the rage in low-power embedded applications 10-15 years ago, just feels weird to see it in a modern design today, when the market now is flooded with low-power ARM chips that are way more capable than that, and probably easier to program.
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…
Some of the SiLabs EFM32 parts have comparable sleep currents.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#219Thanks for sharing your product journey. Making hardware products is very interesting, when a single guy does it.
Would you mind sharing some of your prototype to production journey?
- How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?
- How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#220“Photon's motion sensor can't detect motion behind glass.” That’s a pity. Though probably the use cases behind a window usually have access to power anyway and wouldn’t need this.
The real problem for me is the next point on the page: > When placed in nature, Photon's motion sensor tends to trigger often due to grass or leaves blowing in the wind, which can cause Photon's battery to deplete quickly if configured to capture a photo when motion occurs. A future software update may provide a motion-sensitivity setting to help address this scenario. So, not behind a glass and not outside a glass.…
Yeah, I was trying to set appropriate expectations for the motion capabilities. The sensor is pretty sensitive, so if there's movement within the spec'd range (~5m) it can trigger. It works quite well indoors / in garages / outdoors where there isn't constant movement in the ~5m region.
> On the other side, the demo images on the Mac app page seem to be all outdoor pictures, so I wonder if excessive motion sensitivity is really an issue.
FWIW I captured those using the time-based triggering (every 30 seconds), so the motion sensor was disabled for those photos.