thanks for the tip on number one, that will be a big help in the future...
but what was interesting in this thread for a second, is that the camera would turn itself off while we were trying to dial it up to the higher numbers... we tried it twice and I gave up on trying to go for 1800...
to elaborate on second issue. when I tested the delay at home on saturday, I only had it set for one minute, in fact a ran a second test just now for two minute delay, and it worked fine, in that it turned on and took pics fine at every thirty seconds, (but the screen was staying on for some reason, but I am looking at that further)
in the field when I set it to 300sec, and pressed the shutter, the script started the screen then turned off, but the camera must have turned off (due to inactivity??) before it could complete the countdown. the camera never turned back on to take pics.
so I do think that the camera for whatever reason, is shutting down, could it be because you have the camera going back to playback mode to conserve energy but in playback mode there might be some programming in there somewhere that powers down the camera completely in that mode due to inactivity??? If you open up the camera in playback mode and leave it on, the camera powers down on its on in a few minutes...
that doesn't explain why the camera powered down while we were feverishly pressing buttons to get the delay higher..... but when you think about that you are also in playback mode then, (I start chdk with firmware upgrade each time I want to use it so I am in playback mode from the get go) and the activity of pressing the buttons is only really in the programming of chdk script, and not actually the camera itself so it goes inactive just the same way???
phil