Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

toaster.llc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 309 posts

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#221

Post by wilgertvelinga »

davekeck wrote: post #216
tcmb wrote: post #213

Does 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.

'The Gorilla "mounting tape squares" are strong and don't leave any residue.'

Which is also an engineering marvel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-F2QQuZZGk

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#222

Post by injidup »

scosman wrote: post #49

Okay, you also made a drag and drop terminal app for rebasing?? Super cool products all round. True hacker news. https://toaster.llc/debase/index.html

drag and drop in the terminal is certainly cool but I've been recently getting into lazy git, also a terminal git client and it's workflows are all keyboard driven. It presents a mental model that is much easier to deal with than standard git terminal command line.

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#223

Post by foldr »

imhoguy wrote: post #205
geocrasher wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a different battery chemistry with a lower self discharge rate. No need to be rechargable in most of the use cases, I'd imagine.

Panasonic BR2032 has 30µA discharge rate https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/panasonic-bsg/BR-...

If that's the self discharge rate then the battery would be fully discharged after less than a year on the shelf (given its 190mAh capacity). Coin cells typically have a much longer shelf life than that. I wonder what that figure is, exactly.

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#224

Post by davekeck »

julius wrote: post #219

Thanks 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)?

> - How did you find companies that make the parts (pcb, enclosure)?

For the PCB, it came down to who could meet the specs that I needed for the board. I recall the three important specs being BGA pad spacing, wire thickness, and wire spacing. The ICE40 was the aggressing chip IIRC. I ended up using nextpcb.com.

For the enclosure, I think I just Googled some and had 3 different manufacturers make the same enclosure, and chose the best one to mass produce. I ended up using mfgproto.com.

> - How do you assemble all the parts (do you do that yourself or did you find a company to do that for you)?

For the PCB, I had NextPCB do PCBA, except for the BGAs (which I soldered myself, 500 of them!) and motion sensors, because I didn't trust mailing my high-value stock to China during Chipageddon. That was likely a mistake -- in the future I would have them assemble everything, because their process isn't designed for how I wanted to do things, and soldering that many BGAs sucked.

For the final assembly I did everything by hand (insert PCB into the enclosure, screw in PCB screws, connect battery, add battery shims [to prevent rattling], add RTV gasket to the backplate, screw in backplate screws, add lens adhesive, focus lens while streaming images). It's a ton of manual labor!

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#225

Post by davekeck »

balou23 wrote: post #217

Hi 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 w…

Thanks for the suggestions! The compression is an interesting idea. It's been a while since I touched the FPGA RTL but I think there might be space to fit something like that.

Related to compression -- a dirty little Photon secret is that currently, the 12-bit RAW pixels are written as 16-bit words, so 25% of the SD card (the high 4 bits of every pixel) is actually zeroes. So an easy compression win is to compact those pixels, and we'll go from being able to store 20k photos to 27k photos, and spend less time writing the photos (like you said) which should translate to longer battery life.

It would be interesting to quantify what the biggest consumer of power is while capturing a photo. I'm honestly not sure what the power breakdown would look like (image sensor vs SDRAM vs SD card vs ICE40).

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#227

Post by InCityDreams »

davekeck wrote: post #123
pineaux wrote: post #65

Would buy, but doesn't ship to Europe...

Dang I need to fix that! If you send me an email (support@toaster.llc) I'll let you know when that works.

Another EU purchaser here. I've passed the link around - I think there would be many people over here that would be interested.

Also...consider, dare I say it, Windows? Or am I mis-reading "delightful, Mac-tastic software Photon Transfer is designed with love exclusively for your Mac", though I'm sure the usb c is er...bipartisan?

I'd say 30% of the people I know use a mac, the rest windows, all with linux for work etc.

*getting stuff from the states via post is no problem, just gotta check on import fees (relatively easy to circumnavigate, but I'd rather not).

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#228

Post by mjard »

davekeck wrote: post #163
mjard wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it start replacing the oldest photos?

Currently it replaces the oldest photos, yes. (There might be use cases where you only want to keep the first 20k photos though -- if anyone wants that, get in touch and I can add a setting.)

I figured that was the case. That makes the most sense for your original use-case. I ordered one last night, are you seeing a large uptick of orders from this post?

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#229

Post by TeMPOraL »

squarefoot wrote: post #193
laweijfmvo wrote: post #5

> exclusively for Mac Why not just have it connect as a generic mass-storage device?

> Why not just have it connect as a generic mass-storage device? Actually have it present itself as a MTP (0) compatible device would have been better, but that would require an underlying filesystem, and as the author explained there's no space to add more features. The product is interesting though, and the code is free (thanks!) so I'm positive that Linux support will eventually happen. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org…

Why MTP? It's strictly less functional and more annoying to user than presenting as mass-storage device, and since you need a filesystem either way, might as well go with a protocol that gives you access to files, instead of a slow, half-working abstraction over them.

Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life

#230

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

I don't really understand why this has to be heavily marketed as Mac-only. As an open-source product, restricting the application to the most restricted of consumer operating systems (namely that any consumer hardware can run Linux or Windows, either bare metal or through a VM, whereas only Macs can easily run macOS) seems a bit sad. I had to read through the comments here to realize that as someone who doesn't own a Mac, I _could_ theoretically purchase this and use it, even if it meant sacrificing some UX.

Reading the comments, it would be trivial to even at minimum state that there could exist community support for Linux, in the form of a command-line tool, even if it's not as polished as a Mac app, considering how open this product is about its limitations, and would likely bring in more customers.

Post reply on HN