Hmm,
I want to be careful how I word this, and I may be misunderstanding where you are in your project. You apologise for novice questions, so presumably this project is a learning opportunity as well as hopefully providing some desired result.
In my experience, the key thing about successful projects of any kind is to look first at:
What do we want to achieve?
What are the constraints: Money? Technical difficulty? Time to implement it? Security? etc.
Resources available?
In your case, as an example, Thagrol pointed out IF all you want to do is take a photo every so often and your camera has an electrical or opto shutter release, you could use a low power device like a Pico to operate the shutter, and a large SD card in the camera to store the results. This would greatly reduce the problems with power requirements, and cost. However if the data is required to be processed on the spot by AI for example then conditionally transmitted elsewhere by wifi or a low bandwidth medium over long distances (if it's a wildebeest send it, hippos we dont care.....) then a pico won't do.
It may be that the project is best done in stages, is this bit practical as a building block to a more sophisticated result?
Did you do that sort of thinking before selecting/buying hardware?
BTW how is the camera powered? How far from "civilisation" is this going to be?
Sometimes we look at something and there seems an obvious solution but when we think about it more we realise it won't work or we can achieve a good result far more easily another way. Or even worse we get to spend a lot of time and or money and then find we have to go back to square one (or give up!). Sometimes we need to go round the loop again, and maybe compromise on something (maybe what resolution we can manage?)
In your case, for example:
How much power margin we need to ensure the battery does not overdischarge?
If we lost power would things start working automatically when good power returned?
Would it matter if we missed a few photos?
How do we get the results?
How often will somebody need to visit the camera?
One might argue that the UK HS2 railway project is a lesson to be learnt on how not to do things. When I read about it first I thought it was about bringing UK major cities closer together in terms of reduced journey times and higher capacity. As a bonus providing a fast link to Eurostar and Europe, reducing the need to fly.
So where are we:
Forget the cities further away (arguably those in most need of reduced journey times).
No direct link to Eurostar.
Probably Increased journey time for existing routes.
Massive disruption, cost and time overruns.
Doesn't even reach London properly.
But I digress from your project.........
I am not suggesting you need to write a thousand page document before you start a project (indeed HS2 probably had too many 1000 page documents and not enough thinking,,,,, ) but I would suggest spending some time on planning and thinking (and possibly testing) before committing your precious time to something is worth it.
Again please forgive me if I misrepresent your work, but think about learning with every project.
I want to be careful how I word this, and I may be misunderstanding where you are in your project. You apologise for novice questions, so presumably this project is a learning opportunity as well as hopefully providing some desired result.
In my experience, the key thing about successful projects of any kind is to look first at:
What do we want to achieve?
What are the constraints: Money? Technical difficulty? Time to implement it? Security? etc.
Resources available?
In your case, as an example, Thagrol pointed out IF all you want to do is take a photo every so often and your camera has an electrical or opto shutter release, you could use a low power device like a Pico to operate the shutter, and a large SD card in the camera to store the results. This would greatly reduce the problems with power requirements, and cost. However if the data is required to be processed on the spot by AI for example then conditionally transmitted elsewhere by wifi or a low bandwidth medium over long distances (if it's a wildebeest send it, hippos we dont care.....) then a pico won't do.
It may be that the project is best done in stages, is this bit practical as a building block to a more sophisticated result?
Did you do that sort of thinking before selecting/buying hardware?
BTW how is the camera powered? How far from "civilisation" is this going to be?
Sometimes we look at something and there seems an obvious solution but when we think about it more we realise it won't work or we can achieve a good result far more easily another way. Or even worse we get to spend a lot of time and or money and then find we have to go back to square one (or give up!). Sometimes we need to go round the loop again, and maybe compromise on something (maybe what resolution we can manage?)
In your case, for example:
How much power margin we need to ensure the battery does not overdischarge?
If we lost power would things start working automatically when good power returned?
Would it matter if we missed a few photos?
How do we get the results?
How often will somebody need to visit the camera?
One might argue that the UK HS2 railway project is a lesson to be learnt on how not to do things. When I read about it first I thought it was about bringing UK major cities closer together in terms of reduced journey times and higher capacity. As a bonus providing a fast link to Eurostar and Europe, reducing the need to fly.
So where are we:
Forget the cities further away (arguably those in most need of reduced journey times).
No direct link to Eurostar.
Probably Increased journey time for existing routes.
Massive disruption, cost and time overruns.
Doesn't even reach London properly.
But I digress from your project.........
I am not suggesting you need to write a thousand page document before you start a project (indeed HS2 probably had too many 1000 page documents and not enough thinking,,,,, ) but I would suggest spending some time on planning and thinking (and possibly testing) before committing your precious time to something is worth it.
Again please forgive me if I misrepresent your work, but think about learning with every project.
Statistics: Posted by Pi5_User — Mon Jul 28, 2025 11:28 pm