PARIS hacked Canon: 108 minutes, 1,298 stills

The El Reg Paper Aircraft Released into Space (PARIS) team reckons it's fingered the reason for the Canon A560 power-down, and yes, it's a matter of the batteries, as many of you pointed out. PARIS: Sponsored by Peer 1 To recap, our main space payload will be packed with goodies including video camera, GPS tracking unit, …

[tapanit]

CHKD works with cards bigger than 4G

CHKD *does* work with 16GB cards (at least) just fine - you just have to partition the card in two, a (very small) partition for the CHDK boot stuff and the rest for images, see

http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/Bootable_SD_card

[Gianni Straniero]

Automovil

May I enquire what species of vehicle Sr Haines is driving in this gripping film?

[Anonymous Coward]

3D?

We're sorry that some of you just didn't find this vid exciting enough, lacking as it does Avatar-style 3D rendering

So a second camera running the same script will resolve this?

I do hope that you are planning to keep those batteries snuggly warm as they will conk out a lot quicker at 50kF! Personally I would opt for an external battery pack (with 4 times as many in parrallel) wired to the camera!

[Elmer Phud]

Language

"We gather Daniel Craig's at a bit of a loose end, so we'll see if we can rope him in for our next production, to add a bit of spice."

As this is t'internet then 'loose' should be spelt 'lose'.

(likewise if he's lost anything he'd 'loose' it)

[Rob 101]

I still think You'd be better off with an N900

Camera, GPS, accelerometer and development toolkits all rolled into one.

But since it got and continues to get very little coverage by the reg and is never mentioned in comparison with the Jesus phone or Androids that is possibly not surprising btu a little sad for such a fantastic piece of kit.

It's already been used to control and track another 900 attached to a kite and record skateboard tricks to give points showing its versatility to being used for any purpose and though it's slightly chunky I am sure it's lighter than 3 separate units.

[Si 1]

Paris

Has she had her camera hacked and her naughty photos stolen again?

[Kevin Reader]

That's what I thought the title meant too. (n/t)

That is all.

[Anonymous Coward]

Intervalometer

It seems likely that the start and end of the journey will be most interesting, so a dynamic interval might work better. With more rapid shooting at the start and end.

Requires you to know about the end of course, but the start is do-able....

[beardman]

ha

so you're stuck in spain..?

[Anonymous Coward]

altitude

Good to see that work is coming on. One small question though. When the camera is operating at high altitude, will the low temperature affect performance?

[The First Dave]

Res

What resolution are you taking photos at? Might be worth dropping the res and/or quality to fit more stills into the available storage.

Other thing to look at is one of the cards that have a WiFi connection built in - some of these make the size of the card effectively infinite if you have a suitable storage target in range.

[Jon Green]

Don't forget...

...that the colder the camera, the lower the battery life. And where you're planning to send it, it's very, very cold indeed!

Perhaps Paris, er PARIS, could help to keep it warm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Batteries

Just use the standard two batteries and have a small ram air turbine hung on the back of the glider to provide the extra power. Free leccy all the way down.

[Anonymous Coward]

An 8gb card doesn't need partitioning.

180 minutes, 2113 photos, Duracell Rechargeable Active Charge 2000mAh and 58% of charge left.

[Nebulo]

Daniel Craig ...

is not relevant to PARIS.

But Paris is totally relevant. I know who I'd rather view 1298 stills of.

[Big J]

Re: Battery life

45 minutes is shorter than I would expect - have you disabled the screen?

With the A560 I seem to recall there is an additional hack you can do that allows you to switch between video and photo mode using CHDK. Having said that, the videos aren't usually very good so sticking to photos might be the best plan.

If the camera goes up in a polystyrene box with flight computer also encased (I assume the camera doesn't go on the plane...) the temperature should stay quite reasonable inside for the few hours of flight time.