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Comment by y-c-o-m-b | Hacker News Reader

I don't turn it on simply because it drains an absurd amount of battery. I don't even understand why it does so. Is it old tech? My Blink cameras have 2 AA Lithium batteries that take motion-activated video all day on a busy side-walk for at least a couple of months. Yet one shopping trip drains like 2% battery in Sentry mode, wtf? That's a lot.

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I’ve wondered this myself, how could 50 miles of moving 5000lbs at 60mph be equal to sitting running a camera for a day or two.

When I had a model 3 it also had an absurd amount of drain over night, 4-5% battery when it was just sitting there (without overheat A/C)

Leaving for vacation before I had a home charger was always fraught.

The blink camera has a PIR sensor that wakes it up so it starts recording video. It doesn’t record video the whole time and running the PIR is not energy intensive.

The Tesla has to run the cameras and run computer vision algorithms to determine if something is happening.

The Tesla also has a gigantic battery that’s at least 50 kWh. 2% of that is 1 kWh. Still seems like way too much.

You're comparing a motherboard with dual CPUs at 12+ cores each, a GPU, and 16GB of RAM -- to perhaps an ESP32. Very different design goals.

No one said they had to hook the cameras up to a gaming PC. That’s an engineering choice

> Very different design goals.

From the perspective of a sentry mode: very similar design goals.

Sentry consumes around 200W on Intel Atom and camera based detection enabled. I'd say it's a total overkill. It even heats up the display pretty good when it's relatively chilly outside.

Source: MYP 22 Intel based

Wow, yeah, that's a lot of power. And didn't they already drop it by 40% earlier this year?

Even so, you shouldn't be waking all 24 cores, the GPU, etc. just to record video. Let the cameras DMA into their buffers and wake up a single core when the buffers hit a high water line. The core only needs to be awake long enough to queue up the writes to storage and then it can go back to sleep.

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