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Comment by speleo_engr | Hacker News Reader

If Android is on a camera, I want some sort of a hypervisor situation where it does not interfere with real-time operations. My Canon T4i will very responsively snap a picture once I have locked the focus, aperture, and shutter speed. I do not want to lose that and "gain" lagdroid.

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Also battery life considerations. I wouldn't want to have to carry extra batteries/ wait for android to boot if I go on a hike and need to conserve battery

That would be pretty easy. Lazy solution would basically to just stick an extra processor in the existing hardware that would just poll the camera for data and time critical operations would be handled by the original system

You don't even need a separate processor, grab one of the ARM SoCs with Big/Little cores, control the camera in bare-metal /hard real time in the little core, and keep Android on the big core(s). There's some low-level driver/hal type work to get that setup - but it isn't magic or even a particularly large investment of resources.

And now you're up to your neck in a networking swamp that also drains the battery like it's going out of style. But yeah, it's easy.

Quick google search tells me that I can power a model 2 b rpi for 5 hours off of a camera battery. And you can better than an rpi for power consumption. I could be missing something here, but I used to do a lot of work that boiled down to building linux control units for machines and it genuinely isn't that difficult most of the time.

A DSLR can "sleep" with the power switch on, waiting for a shutter press for weeks. I actually have no idea how long it can go, because the drain seems to be practically zero...

This is an incredible feature. Coming from a mirrorless background, the ability to pull the camera from a waist pouch with a gloved hand, put it to my eye, and press the shutter has been a revelation.

It is many seconds faster, making shots possible that I never would have taken with my mirrorless body.

I used to cover long events with my DSLR - on a single charge, I could do two back-to-back 12-hour events, taking hundreds of images at each with the camera on the entire time, and still have some charge in reserve. Five hours isn't a lot by comparison.

Would that "extra processor" not be better off just being your phone?

If I had a pair of extra hands, perhaps. Note that this goes double into the other issues - now you're worrying about compatibility with the other device, and the communication link.

Sure but you'd wanna duct tape the phone to the camera so you don't have to hold two devices simultaneously. I can see the merits of putting android in the actual camera.

Why would you duct tape them? My phone and camera establish a wireless connection with an NFC touch point to activate it. From there I can transfer photos or use it as a remote viewfinder and shutter.

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