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

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

#301

Post by Neywiny »

davekeck wrote: post #75
nereye wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If external F-RAM is an option, one can use F-RAM from, say Cypress (now Infineon, [1]) together with ARM chips from Ambiq, e.g. Apollo 3 Blue Thin [2], which likely have even better power consumption than an MSP430. [1] https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/memories/f-ram-ferro... [2] https://ambiq.com/apollo3-blue-thin/

Dang very cool. If there's ever a Photon 2 I'll definitely look at the low-power ARM world. (FWIW Photon's USB stack is handled by a STM32F730 and I've been perfectly happy with it. Expensive though.)

IMO that's an odd choice for a micro. It initially looked like it could translate the custom SD card writing to FAT in SW, but with only 64K of flash that's not great. Some STM HAL irqs are almost that size. My recommendation is to find 1 micro that can do low power and USB, and maybe put external FRAM/QSPI for more code storage is needed.

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

#302

Post by rapjr9 »

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…

If you want continuous video for months then you probably need a custom solution using a battery. The battery will have to be somewhat large (solar can help, but don't rely totally on it). LFP batteries like those made by Eco-Worthy might be a good choice, light weight, high power. A $30 battery box (sold for use with lead-acid car batteries) can protect it from weather.

Continuous video for months isn't really possible yet on low power because the camera sensors are not designed for it, current CMOS sensors would have to be totally redesigned. There are people working on custom sensors that are much lower power, rebuilding a camera sensor from the ground up, but it's high level research and I haven't seen that they are commercially available yet (the DOD may have priority, they would love to have long lifetime continuous video on the battlefield). They started working on them about 5 years ago and it involves new micro-fabrication techniques (Chip Elliot was involved), but they weren't entirely sure it was possible.

For time lapse check out the Brinno camera, it's made for time lapse, it has a waterproof shell, it can be powered from USB:

https://brinno.com/

It can be set for automatic exposure so it gathers enough light to record at night (many seconds of exposure if your time lapse interval is long enough) while still handling daylight. It has a lens mount so you can choose wide angle or mild telephoto (maybe others are also available from 3rd parties). A time lapse Brinno plus a custom power system for a continuous video camera would probably at least make sure you get something with two independent systems. Redundency is good in unattended systems.

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

#303

Post by rapjr9 »

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.

Look for one designed to use external power. Lots of people have connected them to car batteries (there are projects on the web). The consumer ones tend to use PIR sensors to trigger short video recordings, which might be a problem if the camera is too far away. Birds tend to be well insulated and may not emit much IR. Maybe pro ones use doppler radar to trigger recordings? You might want to choose one based on how long it can be configured to record video after being triggered, 30 seconds for example may not be long enough for what you want to capture. This is not a normal use of a trail camera so figure out what your needs are and see if there is one that meets them.

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

#304

Post by thalesfc »

davekeck wrote: post #293
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 coll…

thanks!

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

#305

Post by NegativeLatency »

davekeck wrote: post #290
NegativeLatency wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also when the battery dies and it renders the product garbage that only someone with fairly advanced skills can fix.

I 1000% agree with the sentiment, I hate that we throw so many electronics away. I need to make a blog post showing how to replace the battery.

Is the battery soldered? Is it a fairly standard kind of thing like an 18650 (obviously not the same size, but I'm not familiar with what "standard" pouch style batteries exist)?

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

#306

Post by TwoNineFive »

flapjaxy wrote: post #258
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #230

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…

I'm not sure I follow the criticism here. Is the issue that a paid product only supports Mac, or an open source project didn't build for multiple OSs? If it's the first; I've seen tons of Mac only software due to the perception that it's a more lucrative platform. (Users are price tolerant for good products). If it's the last; scratch your own itch. Since it's open source you can write the softer yourself. I'm not su…

This is top comment for a reason.

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

#307

Post by davekeck »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #305
davekeck wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 1000% agree with the sentiment, I hate that we throw so many electronics away. I need to make a blog post showing how to replace the battery.

Is the battery soldered? Is it a fairly standard kind of thing like an 18650 (obviously not the same size, but I'm not familiar with what "standard" pouch style batteries exist)?

It’s not soldered, but it does have a Molex Pico-EZmate connector (chosen for its low profile), and I’m not sure you can find batteries premade with that kind of connector. You could reuse the existing connector with a new battery, but that would ideally involve soldering.

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

#309

Post by timms »

Nice work! It would be cool if you would make a schematic PDF available, the KiCad 7 import of your Eagle files doesn't give a very readable result.

How did you choose the image sensor? Why an ON AR0330, and not OmniVision?

Nice choice to use an MSP430, this is a good application for using FRAM. But why use an ICE40 and an STM32 together? Why not use an STM32 with a DCMI peripheral?

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