Making our Meadow Blog

New Cam and card Works

I have managed to find a 4Gb SDHC card which works,
surprisingly since it is a fairly cheap brand and the one which did not is a
Sandisk. I have connected it up and it seems to be working ok. There is one
issue however – the card is inserted in the battery compartment, rather
than having a separate access. This is a pain (it does annoy me when camera manufacturers
do this) but it is made worse by the fact that they
also increased the size of the battery compartment door has
been increased so much that to open it means that the tripod head plate needs
to come off – which means off course that the alignment of the camera is
thrown off. The only way round it I can think of is to connect a usb cable and
down load the files to a netbook when I need to.

New Cam

Got a new camera today via Ebay. A Canon S5IS, which will definitely
solve the aberration with the current camera’s image, but unfortunately
it did not enable a larger capacity SDHC card to be used. In fact I was
starting to wonder if it would work at all – I had to try three SD cards before
I found one which actually worked! So there is a chance that another SDHC card will
work. But it will take a bit more research.

RAW issue solved

Simply turning off the RAW always setting off solved this
issue which should make all the difference in terms of memory. If I have time
in the morning I will start another trial, if not it will have to wait till the
weekend.

First trial results

Just got back from the Netherlands and had enough time to
check the status of the Meadowcam. It was still powered well (in fact the
battery showed output voltage of 13.48V) but the memory card was full after just
a couple of days. The CHDK settings had been set to save a RAW copy file for
each shot and each was 6Mb. I will try to assemble the files and will amend the
settings of the camera.
 
The important thing is that the timer and the light detector
are working properly and that the timings are correct. The bracketing seems to
be working well so I will just need to change the raw settings.
 
The other issues are the positioning of the camera, which is
easily solved, and the existence of some strange lines, which may be a problem
with the camera. I will see if I can continue as I am, but I might need to find
another camera. Again…