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

toaster.llc

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

#91

Post by davekeck »

j1mmie wrote: post #83

Took a while to find the image resolution - 2304 x 1296 pixels. Or, 3 megapixels. I love the website and the product's design. But I'm not sure what the use case is. Spy cam?

I originally wanted this to try to catch a thief, so there's that. My neighbor recently wanted to figure out what animal is invading their garage, so that's another one.

I spent a lot of time working on the time-tracking aspect too, so making time-lapses is a third:

https://toaster.llc/blog/timekeeping

Another (incredibly stupid or delightfully whimsical, your call XD) is putting it in your fridge to have a collection of images yourself / your family when they're hungry.

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

#92

Post by 23B1 »

davekeck wrote: post #87
wferrell wrote: post #79

What an excellent post. I love it and learned so much. Would you be willing to share a ballpark price for what you pay for the enclosure? And maybe ballpark how many you ordered at once? I have found getting enclosures made to be incredibly expensive -- but I have only ever done VERY low volumes (5-10).

Sure! Checking the invoice, I paid $2205 (including anodizing and shipping) to make 125 enclosures (which includes 125x enclosures, backplates, and buttons). So that works out to $18 per unit. This is my first time doing something like this so I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.

$200 is a very fair price given the capabilities and novelty – since you're at it, would love to hear your BOM cost too!

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

#93

Post by RyJones »

davekeck wrote: post #87
wferrell wrote: post #79

What an excellent post. I love it and learned so much. Would you be willing to share a ballpark price for what you pay for the enclosure? And maybe ballpark how many you ordered at once? I have found getting enclosures made to be incredibly expensive -- but I have only ever done VERY low volumes (5-10).

Sure! Checking the invoice, I paid $2205 (including anodizing and shipping) to make 125 enclosures (which includes 125x enclosures, backplates, and buttons). So that works out to $18 per unit. This is my first time doing something like this so I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.

Reasonable. I find anodizers are easy to find, good ones hard, and great ones almost impossible. I found a great one in Auburn and I feel lucky I did.

Iirc you’re paying for the batch. If you pick a color they don’t do a lot, you’re paying the same for 1pc or 2000. The dye and handling is pretty much the same.

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

#94

Post by davekeck »

polalavik wrote: post #14

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.

> I also love the design of your website, is it a boilerplate/template or did you design it yourself?

Website is painfully custom haha. Credit to the wonderful Iconfactory for the Photon art!

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

#96

Post by eth0up »

Off topic, but all the camera nerds are here, so I'm gonna ask:

I want to attach a cheap camera to an arrow, which may be single use depending on the target. Ideally it would attach with 1/8" thread (presently unknown pitch) or smooth (glueable) 6.2mm shaft. The total weight must be no more than 200 grains.

Any suggestions? I'm pretty ignorant with cameras.

Regarding the Photon, seems really appealing, but I'm an old Linux curmudgeon. The only Mac I ever had ran debian.

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

#98

Post by davekeck »

RyJones wrote: post #93
davekeck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Checking the invoice, I paid $2205 (including anodizing and shipping) to make 125 enclosures (which includes 125x enclosures, backplates, and buttons). So that works out to $18 per unit. This is my first time doing something like this so I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.

Reasonable. I find anodizers are easy to find, good ones hard, and great ones almost impossible. I found a great one in Auburn and I feel lucky I did. Iirc you’re paying for the batch. If you pick a color they don’t do a lot, you’re paying the same for 1pc or 2000. The dye and handling is pretty much the same.

Interesting! I had the same experience with anodization, the quality between manufacturers varied a lot.

So it sounds like you use different companies for machining and anodizing? It certainly seems like you'd get better results from someone that specializes in each...

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

#99

Post by davekeck »

23B1 wrote: post #92
davekeck wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Checking the invoice, I paid $2205 (including anodizing and shipping) to make 125 enclosures (which includes 125x enclosures, backplates, and buttons). So that works out to $18 per unit. This is my first time doing something like this so I have no idea if that's a good deal or not.

$200 is a very fair price given the capabilities and novelty – since you're at it, would love to hear your BOM cost too!

IIRC all the chips were about $100 per unit, but of course that depended on the quantity that I was building (~120). When I looked at it briefly, it looked like I might be able to get the BOM price down to $50-70/unit if I made 1k-10k units.

There was a ton of manual assembly for each unit (some due to my errors, some due to the PCBA's errors, some simply due to the design of the device). All in all, it's not get-rich-quick/ever scheme haha.

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

#100

Post by taldo »

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…

Since the read part is handled by another chip (feeding off of USB power, therefore not terribly power constrained), you could present as a MTP device, or even mass storage, while generating the file structure on the fly. Maybe TIFFs are simple enough so you don't have to mess with the actual image bytes.
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