So as you may know, we have been having trouble with battery on the CHDK camera. We thought we might have to make a new battery and all this crazy stuff. But we managed to find a effective way to save battery. So this canon camera has a sensor thingy to take photos. It surprisingly takes a lot of battery when being used. the only time when the sensor is off is when its reviewing photos. So that's what we did. when it is about to take a photo, it just turns the sensor on for a little bit, takes a photo, then turns it off and waits 45 seconds to take another. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) We got 5 hours out of this. You are probably wondering, what did we take a photo of? well... actually you probably are not wondering that at all because every single time we test this we take photos of our backyard. We actually changed it. Its now taking photos of our pool. Heres what all the pictures look like: believe me, all the pictures look the same. see this one, you see them all. Don't believe me? here's a video of it. Amazing Here's The script. ![]()
0 Comments
We tried the delay in the CHDK script to save batteries. We set it to 9000 seconds which is 2.5 hours, and then tried to take 3 hours of video and photos....
The delay worked and the camera started the script after 2.5 hours, but only took 30 minutes of photos/video before shutting down. In other words, putting the camera delay in didn't help the total run time of 3 hours at all! We tried a second time after setting up the camera settings according to the KAP/UAV script webpage (Camera in P mode, shutoff AF, etc....) and got 15 minutes worth of extra run time. It did the 2.5 hour delay, then ran for 45 minutes... It also shot one video for 1:50 instead of for only 15 seconds.... this is the 2nd time that this has happened with just one of the videos. It wasn't programmed that way... (?) Obviously we have very few options left since this didn't work: 1. Try to implement some other battery save features from other Intervalometer scripts such as Battery Intervalometer, or Ultimate Intervalometer. http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Battery_Intervalometer http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Ultimate_Intervalometer#Display_blanking_mode 2. Make an external battery pack. The battery in the camera is a 3.6V Li-ion battery, with 680mAh of capacity. We would want to triple that capacity. It might be complicated. We tested our CHDK script on the A2500 Canon camera to make sure we have enough battery life and storage.
To give us a shot of the script running for 5 hours, we tweaked the settings to take a picture every 120 seconds, and a 10 second video every 5 pictures (every 10 minutes). The script ran for 3 hours before shutting down. It took 92 pictures. It took 18 videos. 17 of them were 10 seconds long. One of them, for some unknown reason, was 108 seconds long.. ! So we got a total of (17*10) + 108 = 278 seconds of video! So the battery capacity is 92 pictures + 278 seconds of video! This is when the battery is kept warm.. We don't really video or photos for the first half of the flight, because we have the fabulous 808 keychain camera for that. We need this Canon to turn on and shoot the second half. It turns out that in the script there is a delay time with a maximum of 10,000 seconds, which works out to: 10,000 seconds x (60 seconds/ 1 minute) x (1 hour/60 minutes) = 2.77 hours which is 2 hours and ~45 minutes! Perfect! So we are going to test again, with these settings: Delay = 10,000 seconds Shot interval = 120 seconds Video Interleave = 5 shots (shoot video every 10 minutes) Video duration = 10 seconds More on this later! Don't want to test too much because the battery capacity doesn't like being fully drained lots of times. We checked to see if this camera can be charged by USB - it cannot. Duh! WOW! While adding photos the site crashed or something! Now i have to redo all this text! Anyway, my favorite new item is the radio, so i am happy to do this (again...). So how you work a radio is you go up to a repeater (a repeater is like a cell tower, but it goes radio to repeater to radio) And you tune your radios frequency and offset. The frequency is the repeater number, and the offset is the radio you want to talk to's number. You can find those at repeaterbook.com where you put your home adress, and you are brought to a map where you can see where repeaters are near your house, you can click on them also to see their number.
We use a baofeng UV-3R+ handheld radio. It uses 5 watts which can contact ground, and it is very small and light. It uses a 2 meter band, so it can use APRS (which we will explain later). Story time! so we went to a repeater near us, and we tuned into it and put in the offset. We then talked in to the ALMIGHTY RADIO! And the ALMIGHTY RADIO responded in a short "Hello!" so we talked for a while and told him that he was our first contact. He said "congrats! welcome to ham radio" he told us his number: W8FSA. We told him ours: KD8NVZ. The only way you get that number (a call sign) is by buying a HAM license. People have this as a hobby, it sounded fun, but i think i'll stick with flying RC planes. Anyway, keep in touch! -Ezra So after we got the camera down from the pizza box hanging from our swing and probably some neighbors wandering what is going on with us, we looked at some of the photos and videos we got. here they are: It was at that moment... we realized the camera was looking up because it was shaking off the velcro. here are the photos :D I think the CHDK did a amazing job on this.
No glare, no bad zoom, and nothing. this thing was spinning like crazy! you can see how crazy it was by the post below. :3 ↓ ↓ ↓ So as you know, from the most recent post before this, we got a new camera for our flight and now the phone is just for tracking. we got our CHDK to work and now we are testing for the full flight. its likely that when the camera goes into the Stratosphere it will be moving and bumping around a LOT and making the photos not that good. how would we test this though? easy. we just got the camera velcroed onto a pizza box, hung it from our ancient play set, and let the wind blow it around while it took photos. Yes, we know it looks stupid, but it works. P.S not sponsored by Jets Pizza. The CHDK settings for our five hour flight:
shot interval: 60 seconds Shutdown: 0 (forever) Total shots before shutdown: 300 power off when done: Yup Display off: yeah Start delay: 15 seconds Exposure bracketing: off Exposure Compensation: no Zoom: off Focus @ infinity: on TV min: 1/60 Target TV: 1/1000 Max TV: 1/2000 Iso min: 100 Iso max1: 400 Iso max2: 800 (changes how fast the camera takes photos ND filter: Nope Video duration: 15 seconds. Video interleave: 10 USB: no logging: Both All these have the possibility of changing later on. As i have been writing this, the camera is still on the pizza box and we will be posting about that later. :D |
AuthorMalachi and Ezra's page where we build cool stuff and either break it, set fire to it, etc. in the name of science. Archives
August 2019
Categories
All
|