Really cool! How much does it weigh? I'd love to attach it to a collar on my cat to track their fun adventures.
I just put one on my kitchen scale: 70g.
Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
121–130 of 309 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#122Neat, 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.
For this I use a Virb Elite mounted on the bike itself. Garmin stopped making them in 2013 I think, and they can be found in mint condition for $40-50. They're very sturdy, waterproof, and have GPS. The battery life is reasonnable (with new batteries).
The mounting system is very practical, they can be taken off or put back on with one hand, something I was never able to do with a GoPro.
And they just... look weird, so they don't get stolen.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#123Would buy, but doesn't ship to Europe...
Dang I need to fix that! If you send me an email (support@toaster.llc) I'll let you know when that works.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#124That is neat and your project docs are a fun read. You'd get a design identity ++ if the dovetail backplate was more similar to ejecting toast. . . .but looks like that isn't in the final anyway. Did you consider radar[0] instead of PIR with the MPS430? 0/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WiJJgIi3W0
Ohh fancy! No I didn't consider radar, watching that video now.
The main consideration for the motion sensor is power consumption -- Photon's PIR consumes ~2µA. Any idea what the power consumption is for these radar sensors?
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#125so 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 modded iPod classic is hard to beat. Replace the HDD with a CF card (many of the SD and SATA adapter boards don't have support the drive's power saving features) and stick the biggest battery you can get in there. I've seen people get 100+ hours of playback from a modded iPod.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#126> 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.
Most recent mailbag, EEVblog1619: https://youtu.be/ABqDGjcwMsg?t=1118
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It does feel a little weird that the battery outlasts the storage. Maybe I should've gone with 256 GB SD cards == 40k photos.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#128Took 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 collectio…
The fridge image idea is so cool!! Love that. Could the cold become a problem though?
It would be so funny to have such a device with wifi enabled, to live-blog trips to the fridge. But then the battery would become an issue of course.
Instead of making Internet-enabled fridges that serve no purpose, manufacturers should include USB ports inside their fridges.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#129This is really cool.
As a software guy, how can I learn more about making PCBs (other than the linked blog)?
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#130If you don't mind me asking, what is Mac-specific about it? Is it the GUI toolkit? The PC-program toolkits I've used to transfer data to and from embedded devices using USB-C: (Qt, EGUI) don't care what OS you use. The web-based ones like Electron don't either. So, there would be nothing blocking the release ; they just work on any OS you compile on or cross-compile for.
The Mac-specific parts of Photon Transfer (the companion app) are really just the GUI stuff (AppKit) and the GPU shaders (Metal) for the image pipeline. In fact the "MDCUtil" tool should still work on Linux (I haven't tested it in a bit though), and that allows reading imagery from the camera along with lots of other fun debug stuff.
A big part of porting Photon Transfer to Linux would be converting the image pipeline from Metal to... Vulcan (?). The main chunks of that are FFCC illuminant estimation (for white balancing) and LMMSE debayering:
https://github.com/toasterllc/FFCC-Metal https://github.com/toasterllc/LMMSE-Metal
The GUI stuff (list views, image grids, image zooming, oh my) would be a good chunk of work too.