[Stratos Burst] Camera Testing

As I type the camera is perched atop my computer quietly snapping photos of my beautiful mug every two minutes. I plan to let this run until I leave the office today or the batteries run out, whichever comes first.

From this test I hope to gather two pieces of information. First, how long the camera will last on a fresh set of batteries. I'm doing this first test on a set of standard alkaline AA's. The lithium batteries are too expensive to go burning up willy-nilly! But this should give me a ballpark figure under standard operating conditions. (i.e. room temperature, NOT an increase of ambient cosmic rays, etc.) Also, figuring the average image size that will help me calculate how much resolution I should be shooting for when balanced against available memory so I can plan to fill as much of that memory as possible in the time-span I expect to have on the batteries.

This means at X resolution per image, I will be using Y megabytes of memory. If I expect the batteries to last Z minutes, I can divide my total memory to see how many pictures I can fit in, and set an appropriate interval in minutes and seconds.

Make sense? Yeah, thought so.

So I have minimized the power drain. I have set the camera to no-flash as I plan to launch on a sunny day, and that teeny light won't do much good when you're shooting that sexy curve of the earth! I have also turned off all display options such as the picture preview, display stamps, ect. I cannot seem to find a setting that will allow me to simply turn off the LCD screen to save power. I can dial down the usage by setting it to turn off after 10 seconds. I  am looking into a secondary script, LCD backlight, that will allow me to turn the back-lighting off which is probably the most power-hungry part of the display.

Edit: Well that sucked. It ran for maybe two hours before the batteries gave out. That was shooting at intervals of two minutes. I have a secondary intervalometer script that will let me turn off the backlight after the first few shots. Hopefully that will save a bunch of power. I may have to space out my intervals a bit too.

More after I load that script and pop in a fresh pair of batteries.