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

291–300 of 309 posts

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

#291

Post by yangikan »

whatahw wrote: post #239
LiquidPolymer wrote: post #133

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…

Why not use a trail camera? They do everything this device does but better, plus they have video and night vision. And you can buy one for $50 instead of $200.

Do you have any suggestions for a good one?

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

#293

Post by davekeck »

thalesfc wrote: post #285

hey Dave, what would you recommend if someone wanted to go from nothing (maybe some softw. experience) to be able to do a hardware design like this? Is there any book/courses you consider to be a must?

- I think the most important skill for making hardware is just having a good fundamental understanding of electricity. Just developing an intuition around Ohm's law gets you remarkably far in terms of developing and debugging circuits. Towards that end, Khan's "Introduction to electrical engineering" and MIT's 6.01SC Unit 3 both look great.

- For this specific project, I needed to program an FPGA so I drew on my college experience (18-240) where we learned about FPGAs and Verilog. Coursera's "Introduction to FPGA Design for Embedded Systems" looks like a good option.

- Don't be discouraged by hardware tools. Coming from a software background, using hardware tools is like traveling to a foreign land where good UX is punishable by death. At its core, designing PCBs is really just drawing 2D shapes, and it's striking how painful drawing is using hardware tools (eg Eagle, Kicad) versus how delightful drawing is using artistic tools (eg Sketch, Figma).

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

#294

Post by account42 »

wilg wrote: post #274
azinman2 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird bone to pick. You could say “would support for other platforms be on the horizon?” but instead you take it almost maliciously. This take is very compatible with what I’ve read about why people stop writing Linux commercial software: 95% of the support, 2% of the sales. If it’s open and you want to create Linux / windows support, just do that versus complain that the creator of a $200 small scale device h…

This is just a toxic attitude from Linux people you see on everything. They're always finding a way to be slighted by software not being made for their niche platform, as though it's trivial to support multiple platforms properly.

> toxic attitude

If everything you see is toxic maybe the problem is you.

> as though it's trivial to support multiple platforms properly

It is trivial compared to creating something useful in the first place.

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

#295

Post by whatevaa »

Zambyte wrote: post #249
azinman2 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird bone to pick. You could say “would support for other platforms be on the horizon?” but instead you take it almost maliciously. This take is very compatible with what I’ve read about why people stop writing Linux commercial software: 95% of the support, 2% of the sales. If it’s open and you want to create Linux / windows support, just do that versus complain that the creator of a $200 small scale device h…

There is a pretty big gap between the narrative in the post here: "only supports macOS currently", and what the website says: "Exclusively for Mac" in a Just Girly Things cursive font. The latter makes it sound like they'd reject support if someone handed to them on a silver MR shaped platter.

Support is not a one time thing. It's perpetual. Bugs will happen, feature requests will come, especially with Linux, cause there is no such thing as standard Linux. Nobody has to support your things for free. Support it yourself. Wait, that is hard work? Well...

This entittled atittude is how open source maintainers get burned out. If you care about OSS, stop it. Get your hands dirty.

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

#296

Post by tobeagram »

I feel like there's a huge market for this, especially as it can be used so well by consumers a fun (non) disposable camera.

Lots of my friends have started buying disposables or point and shoot cameras as an excuse to solely take pictures and not worry about how they look until after they been developed. This is perfect for that, will start recommending it!

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

#297

Post by foldr »

account42 wrote: post #294
wilg wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just a toxic attitude from Linux people you see on everything. They're always finding a way to be slighted by software not being made for their niche platform, as though it's trivial to support multiple platforms properly.

> toxic attitude If everything you see is toxic maybe the problem is you. > as though it's trivial to support multiple platforms properly It is trivial compared to creating something useful in the first place.

If it's so trivial then why hasn't the author done it? Do you really think there is some kind of malicious motivation here?
Post reply on HN