The brownout prevention hack you mentioned in the pcb design page is really neat!
Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
171–180 of 309 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#172Great product! Out of topic: I see this trend where people do not capitalize the first letter of their title. Any reason ?
All-lowercase is an aesthetic choice. For example, Keybase doesn't capitalize the first letter of their email subjects. I believe it's meant to seem friendlier / more informal than perfect capitalization.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#173Great product! Out of topic: I see this trend where people do not capitalize the first letter of their title. Any reason ?
Makes it feel less corporate, more authentic, I feel
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#174> 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…
> 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.
Hmm, what about a dongle that connects between the camera and computer? The dongle wouldn't have to worry about battery life because it'd have USB power. It could do the translation to mass-storage in hardware so the computer wouldn't have to be running macOS.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
> should obviously be nearly completely agnostic Is it obvious? Is it free (as in resources) to support agnostic platforms and systems? Is the threshold for making anything that it needs to be compatible with everything?
In general, no. However a security camera that works with all operating systems just needs to expose a drive via USB… as has been done for decades now.
Apparently, to take the processing off of the camera chip, the decision was to:
1. Not use a filesystem on the SD card;
2. Write RAW files only
This means software is needed to both transfer files, and to convert them into an image format.
Personally, I'd put that software on board, with extra dedicated hardware if necessary (it can be powered off of USB), and make the device appear as a massage storage device to a USB host.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#176I wonder how much would it decrease the battery life to add a screen. Maybe just an e-ink display that refreshes to show the most recent image? I'd love to have a dead-simple point-and-shoot camera for my little kids to play with.
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#177This 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 don't mind a tangential question, what are some good places to watch condors in CA? We watched them at the Pinnacles National Park and loved the experience.
I don't have an answer, but at least for Europe you can use www.birdingplaces.eu. The website has some entries for California, but couldn't find condors. Good luck!
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#178This 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…
Unrelated to the camera. But couldn't you add a long cable to a place where you can change a battery occasionally? Or use an external solar rechargeable battery pack?
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#179It usually makes sense to have a slew of tests formally defined and to write a test that functionally checks every subsystem. If you don't test, Murphy ensures you always make errors before ordering next revision boards. Rushing never helps. Assumptions always fail. Hardware's very unforgiving coming from software, just because our brains are too impatient and we feel it's OK to cowboy all the time.
For most of my boards I wound up writing a bunch of tests that automate current readings across different power rails while stepping boards through different states. This verifies that subsystems are moving approximately how I expect them to move without having to make too much of a manual test, and allowing full validation of remote control round trips. Really makes proper testing easier.
For a camera, having an LED rig on your test jig to check pixels move in the right direction when lit in different colors would be a reasonable approach.
Cool fix though... at least until the components age and the net properties shift subtly...
Re: Show HN: I made a tiny camera with super long battery life
#180Earlier 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…
Love these answers. I declare you officially to be a badass.
Indeed, kudos for that. Nice to see the out of the box thinking.