I recently built an always-on recording device, primarily for recording audio consistently and constantly - this is not for surveillance purposes, but rather fo

I recently built an always-on recording device, primarily for recording audio consistently and constantly - this is not for surveillance purposes, but rather for musicians and creatives who don't want to have to remember to press the Record button in the middle of a great performance. I used the Zero-W and some tricky shell scripts pushing arecord/aplay around, with a turboLua front-end, and .. it works pretty well! I set it up to record continuously, deleting audio content only once it gets 'stale' as per the users preferences, with options ranging from 1 minute - 5 minutes - 15 minutes - 30 minutes - 1 hour - 3 hours - 5 hours - 24 hours .. and built a front-end to allow the user to Keep the time-period they feel they might have captured something great. This heuristic is somewhat similar to the deadman-switch/security-camera mechanism used in a lot of surveillance products. It works so well, I kind of wonder why its not really a standard already. I guess there is still a kind of 'economy preference' where folks don't really want to fill up their storage space, but these days 128Gigs can go a long way. I'm pretty sure this heuristic should become a norm, one of these days. Its so inspiring to set up, forget, and then - after a few hours of jamming - come back and find the stuff you want to keep, having all the rest of the house-keeping done for you.