Hi folks,
Well it's been about a year now since I first discovered CHDK and started building time-lapse rigs, using IXUS160s.
I've been helped a lot in my journey by the fine people on this forum and I've had some great results but now I'm starting to think I need a more robust solution to proceed in a commercial direction with my time-lapse rigs and the reason boils down to power consumption and temperature (I'm in Australia).
My most preferred interval for images is 60 seconds, so my cameras and Raspberry Pi controlled, Internet connected (wifi or more recently 3/4G mobile data) rigs run constantly during the day with an average power draw of 8W (measured with a cheap, consumer AC Watt meter).
I use weatherproof outdoor enclosures, with sun shields but when they're in the full Sun, I've been encountering camera shutdowns, with logs showing a sensor temperature of 80 degrees C. It seems the camera sensor (not the LCD display, the actual picture sensor) remains on the entire time the camera is powered and the heat just builds up.
I've discovered some reasonably low power DC Peltier cooling systems with the upside that the system only needs cooling when the Sun is out and therefore well suited for Solar Panel supply but it's a slippery slope, the more electrical components I add, the bigger the panels and battery I need, the cost goes up and the mounting gets harder and the complexity goes on and on.
So recently I've started looking at how the bigger, long running professional players in the market manage this and they seem to do it without cooling. Using a micro processor control for camera control, then, if Internet connectivity is required, using a linux board to handle networking and uploads with much less frequency.
Digital SLR cameras seem to be dumber than the Canon CHDK cameras and I've been told their sensors turn off in between shots. Either that, or one can power up an SLR very briefly, take the shot using an electronic shutter release and then power down again to achieve the same thing. With my IXUS, the lens extension is a big, albeit brief, power draw, which might negate the saving of turning the camera off.
I write in the hope that someone could either suggest a way to shut off the IXUS160 sensor, inbetween shots, or perhaps an alternative, microprocessor-based variant of CHDK that I can use. I did look briefly at STM32 controllers but found the initial learning curve a bit too steep. The connections for programming, unfamiliar programming language and firmware updating rather stumped me.
However there seem to be a whole new breed of Internet of Things devices with built in network connectivity that look very promising. One can be found here
https://core-electronics.com.au/pycom-gpy.html. It has a built in real time clock and SD card, and runs MicroPython, which is a bit more familiar and easy to implement.
I fear my leaning towards DSLR's could be seen as a betrayal of the whole idea of CHDK. Super high quality images from affordable consumer cameras but that's not my intention. My experience has been so positive up to now, I'm deeply indebted to CHDK for the journey. I just don't know if this bus can get me all the way to where I am now inspired to go.
I'm hoping I might have missed a development along the way that might solve my issue. It's easy to do in a forum so large.
Any suggestions?
Cheers
Sdack