Extending battery life when doing time lapse

Quote from: JAB on 06 / July / 2012, 07:23:06

Hi guys,
I would like to know if it is possible to somehow prolong the battery life of a camera when doing time lapse photography. I know that it is possible to turn the LCD display off but the camera is still always on... Is it possible to make the camera go to sleep after each photo and then wake it up just in time to take the next?

As you can imagine, there has been lots of discussion about this here in the forum over the years. Just search for "battery life" in the search box at the top.

As far as making the camera "sleep", I don't believe that is possible. You can turn the camera off under script control and you can specify a script to run automatically on startup. But so far the only proposed solution to actually waking it up is some sort of external mechanical servo hooked to external power & a timer.

You can save some power by switching to Playback mode when not taking a picture. This two part article (the pdf's that start with "bugsplatter") is particularly interesting - lots of very detailed work and measurements were done :

https://www.box.com/s/tscho3m30j/1/55257469/1370873701/1

This technique turns off the display (rather than just the backlight) for some additional savings :

http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=2075.msg19129#msg19129

The most common solution is to go with an external battery pack. Here's a few links ;

http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=2644.msg24572#msg24572
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=6615.msg71495#msg71495
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=6207.0
http://chdk.setepontos.com/index.php?topic=5797.0

Please post if you find additional solutions or optimizations.