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

toaster.llc

31–40 of 309 posts

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

#31
post #12

Wonder if this could be co-opted to function like a Narrative Clip. Take a photo every 30 seconds (or something like that). I had mine for 3 years before it died

50,000 pic battery life * 1 pic every 30 seconds = ~17 day battery life. Not bad

Small note: though the battery will last for 50k pictures, the storage will begin overwriting old photos after ~20k.

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

#32

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

Saw it on EEVBlog, even owning a Mac is not sufficient if its not the latest OS version. SD Card doesnt store pictures in windows readable format either.

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

#33

so cool! For your next trick, how about a super long battery life MP3 player? A friend asked if I knew of an MP3 player that would be good for a two-week hike with no access to electricity, and it really seems like there's nothing out there beyond carrying around a bunch of batteries.

FiiO M3 Pro? https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-M3-Pro-Resolution-Touchscreen/dp... > 15 hours battery life and 35 days standby time: Adopt 1000 mAh high-capacity lithium-ion battery and USB-C charging technology. The M3 Pro has a battery life up to 15 hours and standby time up to 35 days. That means if you listen 3.5 hours every day, the M3 Pro can go for a whopping 1 week before needing to be charged again!

My Cowon D2 might be old but it still goes on for days and days and ... you get it, it's awesome!

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

#34

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

I (as a non-mac user, but impulse buyer of odd camera gear) appreciate the "exclusively for Mac" label put just after the fold. I usually have to read pages (about software) on HN for minutes before finding out (in a footer or "get it here" link) that it's Mac-only. This way I just know it's not for me and I can continue with my boring life.

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

#36

so cool! For your next trick, how about a super long battery life MP3 player? A friend asked if I knew of an MP3 player that would be good for a two-week hike with no access to electricity, and it really seems like there's nothing out there beyond carrying around a bunch of batteries.

FiiO M3 Pro? https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-M3-Pro-Resolution-Touchscreen/dp... > 15 hours battery life and 35 days standby time: Adopt 1000 mAh high-capacity lithium-ion battery and USB-C charging technology. The M3 Pro has a battery life up to 15 hours and standby time up to 35 days. That means if you listen 3.5 hours every day, the M3 Pro can go for a whopping 1 week before needing to be charged again!

15 hours seems not that much considering an iPod nano can do 30 hours (according to Apple)

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

#37

Really well done! I also love the design of your website, is it a boilerplate/template or did you design it yourself? Is this the same sensor as the rpi hq cam? Would be cool to have interchangeable lenses on this, but that might make weatherproofing it difficult.

It says here [1] that the image sensor is AR0330.

[1] https://toaster.llc/blog/architecture/index.html

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

#38
post #10

Love that everything is open source! Code relating to cameras have been traditionally locked down and hidden under NDAs. Surprised there's no sample photos nor specifications on image sensor.

Looks like 5MP but saves as 3MP files. https://github.com/toasterllc/MDCCode/blob/6afdde594861264f8... Pixel resolution Size = 2304 x 1296 = 2,985,984 pixels Pixel count = 2.99 million pixels Resolution = 2.99 mega pixels Aspect Ratio Width / Height: 1.78 "landscape" (horizontal) orientation Type of aspect ratio = "HD 16:9" Couple photos here too: https://github.com/toasterllc/MDCCode/tree/6afdde594861264f8... I gues…

> Looks like 5MP but saves as 3MP files.

OMG that's so refreshing. Just recently I've come across, both from garage sales, a "40MP" camera smartphone (Chinese brand-X) that actually has, probably, a 13MP class sensor in it and upscales, and a wildlife camera that does the same.

Waste a great deal of storage just to fool people into thinking they got a better camera, and then you have to downscale all that again to achieve something like pixel-level sharpness.

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

#39

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

Totally fair question! My reasons were:

1. To maximize Photon's battery life I tried to make the hardware do the absolute minimum to record imagery. To that end, Photon stores images on an unformatted SD card (ie one huge linear array of bytes) which is easy and fast to index into.

2. A 16-bit MSP430 handles writing the image data, and the MSP430's codespace is 99% exhausted without dealing with the complexities of a filesystem like FAT32, so adding support for a filesystem wouldn't currently fit. (This line of MSP430, MSP430FR2433, has a maximum of 16 KB of FRAM, but perhaps I could use a different line.)

3. Photon stores images as RAW image data that require post-processing to view the images. Since I wanted to provide a polished app to view the imagery anyway, I figured I'd just make it a requirement.

I'm not saying those are all particularly good reasons, but that was my reasoning anyhow.

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

#40

so cool! For your next trick, how about a super long battery life MP3 player? A friend asked if I knew of an MP3 player that would be good for a two-week hike with no access to electricity, and it really seems like there's nothing out there beyond carrying around a bunch of batteries.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NAJ3KQB

...probably at least 10-25 hours playback on a single battery, which means 8 batteries gives you 80 hours of listening (2 weeks).

For that space though, you could scavenge a solar garden light charger and get indefinite listening with ~4 batteries. 1 loaded, 3 charging, with a nominal "fully charge 3 batteries with 16 hours of daylight", which means a ~33% duty cycle.

One sunny day charges 3 batteries, which means you have 45 hours of charge before needing to obtain another 16 hours of sunlight.

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