I am having trouble with cell signal in my area at the moment it's hit and miss for the LookOut. My question is, if there are pictures taken when the camera doesn't' have signal will they upload when signal reception is strong enough. if not can you retrieve these thumbnails at a later time somehow? Which one of the accessory antennas works best. I may need to purchase one so maybe I can get it higher up a tree for better reception. And also I thought I read somewhere that maybe in the near future there will be a solar powered external battery setup available?
I want to respond again to this question to make sure people know how cool the feature I put in for this is. when the camera is sending photos to the server each one is numbered incrementally. so suppose the last photo was PICT0100.JPG.
Then the camera sends in PICT0104.JPG, immediately I know that 101, 102 and 103 were not sent in. I then queued action requests for this camera to resend those photos. that request remains in place until it is completed or cancelled by the owner.
the camera will retry 3 times per each photo per each event. this means if at all possible, all missing photos will make it to the server.
we can't manufacture bandwidth where there is none but its the best we can do. As far as I can tell this will make the Lookout as reliable as I can make it.
Now when you power off the camer and back on again I "restart" my accounting on missed photos. You may have swapped the SD card. thnk about it.
So, suppose the last photo send was 205. then you swap SD cards and forgot to remove old photos from it and the last photo there is 500. I am not going to request 206 through 500 !!!! I have to start over with my missing photo accounting at this time. So it takes two photos sent to the server before it will begin processing missed photos otherwise we can run into nasty situations like I just described.
In the end I feel this makes the camera as reliable as it can be. also each upload can employ a multi-block upload scheme as well to improve throughput. After all, the reason you bought a cellular camera was to get photos delivered wireless. If it misses 25% you might as well buy a $99 camera and go swap SD cards! This was my argument when I designed the block transfer, the retry per vent logic and the missing photo reprocess logic. Camera engineers do not always see the big picture and I have to push to get the technology to perform the way I want it to perform like these features. I can only build my side of the puzzle. I also have to deal with factory and work with them to build the camera firmware side then test everything for weeks before we release it. they do not always see the methods in my madness.
I know the portal has a lot of features and settings and it can make the system seem complicated to a new user. I worry about this but I do not know how to remove features I feel are very important just to dumb it down. I hope that if you talk to people and they comment about the complexity you can back it up by saying that with power and flexibility comes a certain level of complexity and that if they just play with it for an hour they will get a clearer understanding of it all.
- By dbaxter
- By reaperman
- By Mauri740