alt Hacker NewsIt's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame that the SoC the Raspberry Pi line is based on has no kernel support (or IIRC hardware support) for S3 or anything similar.
Replies
The early Sony Alpha A7 cameras run Android (really: you could jailbreak and write your own PlayMemories apps)
https://github.com/ma1co/sony-pmca-re
https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/59226/does-the-son...
So there must have been a way to do this at that time. (I suspect a simpler subsystem does initial boot response).
I did contemplate building something around one of the Arducam modules and an RP2350.
i built my own camera out of a Zero 2W (happort.org/camera) and by disabling Picam2 and letting the OS (Debian Bullseye) idle, i can get 2 days of shots and some videos while i walk around the city/hiking out of 3 18650 batteries... bringing 3 spare batteries in my backpack never put me needing battery in any situation! starting Picam2 takes a fraction of a second
I bet this could be changed to seconds if a unikernel type approach were used. There’s no need to boot a full OS. I understand the developer starting with Linux, though, as I’m sure it’s easier for debugging.
It’s possible to boot Linux in seconds, it’d just be a terrible developer experience.
you can get a zero booting under 10 seconds fairly reliably.
still slower than a hot phone with an app, but it's faster than 22s.
Not from off state, though? Granted I still expect the iphone to boot quicker than 20 seconds.
It's unfair to compare an idling deep sleep device with a cold boot.
However, there is a shortcut: Just don't boot a full OS (thinking of custom firmware which boots in fractions of seconds, standard in the Microcontroller world). Or boot an optimized Linux user space. I am confident with a bit fiddling one can bring down a standard SBC Linux to a few seconds from cold to ready.