After every shot the playback mode came on to display the picture just taken. This lasted about 5 seconds. I presume that is according to spec.
The script supports multiple "power savings" modes. Your SD1000 has an optical view finder so the the DISP button on your camera should be capable of totally disabling the LCD display. Just select the
DispKey option for the "Display blanking mode" parameter. This mode actually saves more power than any other incidentally. If you press the "
SET" button (or anything other than "
MENU") the display will come on for 30 seconds/button press if you want to see what's happening.
As far as the playback mode coming on to display the picture just taken, that's something you setup in the Canon menu while in shooting mode. The menu item will say something like "Review" and may give you choices like OFF, 2 sec, 3 sec, ... HOLD (taken from my A1200 menu - YMMV). Select OFF and the switch to playback mode after each shot will not happen.
One thing that I will bring to your attention is the ultimate.log file that is created.
..
MAY 25 12:18:11:2013: display changed
...
The file looks like this for pretty much the entire 7 hours. The file size for this test was only 56KB, but for a weeks or months long deployment, it could be significant. Is this a result of one of the settings that I chose? I went for maximum screen blanking to conserve battery power, but I doubt that would drive this logging.
Frankly, I didn't pay much attention to what I was shoving in the log file. Even with months of running you would only use up the equivalent of one or two photos. However, the "display change" was more of a debug message I used while trying to get the various power savings, display blanking and display enable from a button press working. I'll nuke it.
I also gave some thought to adding two logging levels - normal and verbose. But that's a bit bigger cleanup project than I have time for today.
Thanks again for your attention; I'll be testing the reboot configuration the next couple of days and be going for my solar build. I'll keep you posted.
The reboot is probably the dodgiest part of the code - I did a lot of testing but testing ones own code is at best suspect in most cases.
One last thing: is there a way for the log file to capture battery voltage? Or maybe internal temperature?
Trivial change - I'll add to the shooting log printf statements.
Updated version later today.
Note to MyselfOne additional feature that occurs to me. When going to night mode, it might be nice to switch the camera to playback mode (even if a different power saving mode is selected) so that the len retracts. Keep the lens clean, safe and maybe condensation free? The only issue would be Tv mode - where it would have to come out of playback mode to periodically check the exposure. Need to think a bit more about that one.
