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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

#41

Post by Rinzler89 »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #7

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.

>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.

Go on the used market and look for old iRiver players if you can, preferably the T10. They take AA batteries and last forever (45+ hours), have a rugged sporty design and had the best non-Apple quality and UX.

The only downside is the small flash storage on them for today's standards but only the old players were feature AA batteries, before they all switched to sealed internal lithium meaning they are now dead.

But on the upside the name brand players from 20 years ago had higher quality MP3 decoding SoCs and audio DACs, while the new MP3 players with AA batteries you can buy today are all bottom of the barrel chinesium e-waste.

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

#44

Post by tredre3 »

davekeck wrote: post #39
laweijfmvo wrote: post #5

> 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…

It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly!

Personally I think you should keep the focus on a polished mac app. For other platforms you can do just the bare minimum with a web app that uses WebUSB. People will bitch that it's Chromium only but, I mean, chromium has 95% market share outside Apple world (and I say this as a FF user).

A hardware solution could be to add a cheap microcontroller that would handle the usb port. It wouldn't be powered by the battery, only USB and it would act as a proxy between the raw sd card and the computer. Presenting a mass storage to the computer with folders, converting images to PNGs. Such capable MCUs are very cheap (rp2040, esp32-s3) but it certainly adds complexity to your project...

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

#45

Post by NegativeLatency »

Neat, if there was something like this that was more like a car dashcam, I'd really like something for my bicycle helmet, I want a dashcam like experience incase someone hits me, but the battery life and charging ergonomics combined with having to empty the flash card on a gopro makes it not work well for the usecase.

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

#46

Post by NegativeLatency »

clumsysmurf wrote: post #16

I try to avoid devices with built in batteries. Could a version be created that uses a replaceable 18350, 18650 or even AA? I'm OK swapping every few months etc, but when its time to dispose of it, I don't want to fret about how to remove the battery for recycling.

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

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

#48

Post by foofoo55 »

tredre3 wrote: post #44
davekeck wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly! Personally I think you should keep the focus on a polished mac app. For other platforms you can do just the bare minimum with a web app that uses WebUSB. People will bitch that it's Chromium only but, I mean, chromium has 95% market share outside Apple world (and I say this as a FF user). A hardware solution could be to add a cheap microcontroller that woul…

I would suggest the same hardware solution, where the USB powers a device-side presentation of the raw data into a more universal mass storage device. This also allows file transfer to any device without requiring special software. I did something like this in 2008 or so (using a FTDI chip and PIC mcu, and boy was it ever slow).
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