davekeck

7 ms·

31.
by davekeck 2y ago
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?
32.
by davekeck 2y ago
Dang I need to fix that! If you send me an email (support@toaster.llc) I'll let you know when that works.
33.
by davekeck 2y ago
I just put one on my kitchen scale: 70g.
34.
by davekeck 2y ago
Indeed it's 2304 x 1296, 12-bit color. (That .jpg in the repo was a test image from a different camera.)
35.
by davekeck 2y ago
Totally fair, I feel the same way. Originally Photon was going to use AAs but I changed course when I decided I wanted to make it water resistant. (FWIW Photon uses a 103040 which is pretty commonly available, the only caveat is it needs a
36.
by davekeck 2y ago
Hmm interesting question. I think a lot of the FPGA RTL should be reusable for most parallel-output image sensors. (It seems like all the really nice image sensors are headed towards MIPI nowadays though...) I tried to make SDController.v a
37.
by davekeck 2y ago
For some reason I never thought to weigh it! Need to update the website. I just put one on my kitchen scale: 70g.
38.
by davekeck 2y ago
I think it should work pretty well for that use case. I need to add support to the companion app to make exporting videos convenient though. Right now it only allows batch-exporting images.
39.
by davekeck 2y ago
Thanks bud! XD
40.
by davekeck 2y ago
Really appreciate the feedback. The honest answer is I'm a Mac guy, and a terrible businessman. FWIW I love Linux and used it extensively to develop Photon. (In fact the "MDCUtil" tool for debugging Photon already supports Li
41.
by davekeck 2y ago
It can't record video, just stills. (In my testing I usually got ~80k stills out of the device with a new battery.)
42.
by davekeck 2y ago
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
43.
by davekeck 2y ago
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 s
44.
by davekeck 2y ago
> 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!
45.
by davekeck 2y ago
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 to
46.
by davekeck 2y ago
I'm admittedly trying to "celebrate my constraints" of finite time and money haha. I would love to support more systems if there's enough interest.
47.
by davekeck 2y ago
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
48.
by davekeck 2y ago
Dang I haven't mustered the courage to watch Dave's critique yet! I wrote/tested Photon Transfer (the companion app) on macOS 10.15 (Intel), so it should work on that and above. If not it's a bug that I need to fix!
49.
by davekeck 2y ago
> Is the battery replaceable if it fails? It's replaceable but I hadn't thought that far ahead regarding end-users doing it. The caveats are: 1. I made a special tool to avoid scuffing the aluminum when removing the backplate:
50.
by davekeck 2y ago
Yeah my plan was to hide it in the garage's rafters. (I ended up moving out of my apartment complex anyway though, so I ended up not needing it for that anyway.)
51.
by davekeck 2y ago
Until I add some good imagery to the site, you can see real imagery in the demo mode of Photon Transfer: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photon-transfer/id6476578040
52.
by davekeck 2y ago
That means a lot, thanks friend.
53.
by davekeck 2y ago
Dang very cool. If there's ever a Photon 2 I'll definitely look at the low-power ARM world. (FWIW Photon's USB stack is handled by a STM32F730 and I've been perfectly happy with it. Expensive though.)
54.
by davekeck 2y ago
> That is likely even lower than the effective self discharge rate of a lithium coin cell battery. That's what I've found too. Based on my measurements and calculations, Photon uses 5µA (MSP430 + motion sensor) while sleeping,
55.
by davekeck 2y ago
I'm not too familiar with the DNG format, but if a DNG file could be as simple as [header][2304x1296x2 bytes][footer] then it might be possible with the current hardware. But without a filesystem, would it be useful to have DNG files s
56.
by davekeck 2y ago
> It's pretty cool that your MSP handles the SD Card directly! The MSP430 is actually the puppet master for an ICE40 FPGA that does the high-speed transfers (102 MHz) between image sensor -> SDRAM -> SD card. Here's a pos
57.
by davekeck 2y ago
I should definitely add some sample images... For now, the Mac app has real imagery in the demo mode: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photon-transfer/id6476578040 (The demo photos are from the Lick Observatory
58.
by davekeck 2y ago
> But why not make a non-polished Windows app as well? Or have someone make it? If I had more time and money I certainly would! > Also, is the RAW data specific to the device and if so, why? To maximize battery life, the hardware does
59.
by davekeck 2y ago
One main reason I chose the MSP430 was for the FRAM. Photon stores all its state (ie the photo ring buffer indices, and user settings) in one big FRAM struct, which can be read/written just like RAM, but persists across power cycles an
60.
by davekeck 2y ago
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

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