Figured I'd follow up after nearly 5 months after my questions above. My camera has been taking a photo every 20 seconds with SUIx almost non-stop during that time, 700GB so far. I'm super happy about the photo set I have collected and have started writing scripts to create interesting content beyond the daily time lapses.
I ended up needing daily automatic reboots after all, but for a completely different reason than mentioned above: I use a Wifi-SD card (Flashair) to get the photos off the camera continuously. But the get_jpg_count() counter doesn't know that I am deleting photos in the background and keeps decrementing the counter of how much space is left. The daily reboot serves the purpose to reset that counter and make the camera realize that there are, in fact, many GB free. Maybe there is a more elegant way to work around this?
A nice side effect of daily reboots is that the two clocks to sync daily, so one source of time drift is gone. However, I still get approximately 20 seconds drift per months which I measure with a manual process (move an accurate clock into the photo frame once a week) and correct in post-processing. Next time I build a setup like this I will definitely figure out how to automate this process
One issue I've found is that when the script shuts down due to disk full, it erases the "autostart" setting. That leads to this sequence of events:
- The camera incorrectly concludes that the SD card is full and shuts down
- I confirm that the SD card does actually have space and press the power button to start the camera back up
- SUIx doesn't auto-start
- I remove the camera from the fixture, go into the SUIx settings, re-activate autostart
- Put camera back into fixture, power off, power on again
- SUIx auto-starts, operation resumes
Would it be possible to have the autostart setting retained even when the scripts shuts down due to a problem?
Oh, if you want to see the results, the daily videos are on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfgbxOCayX3p8vCILXH9T1g/videos. I've started tinkering with scripts to generate other formats (see attachment) but there's more work needed there to deal with annoying problems such as birds and the wall we mounted the camera to buckling when exposed to direct sunlight...