While I appreciate the focus on battery conservation, there may be times when higher data rates or other power-eating activities — or just longer-term monitoring are desirable. Will it be possible to power Pickup with an external battery as well for such circumstances?
(Please pardon if this has been discussed previously.)
Yes. To be clear, Pickup has a USB-C power port, and you’ll be able to run it off a battery (or wall power) that way.
Separately, another reason we don’t want full speed on all the time is that at 10 samples/second, at some point the bandwidth and storage needed for that becomes excessive. Of course, with the lightweight nature of the communication, I don’t see that happening any time soon, and if we were to keep data rate below what you need, you can always send data to another system. Right now, we’re going to keep an eye on things as we get Pickup in your hands, but we’ll give Kickstarter backers as much bandwidth as we can.
To help us design for it, what are the use cases where y’all want high data rates?
Well have been giving this a lot of thought, and To be fair I have not come up with any that would need a high data ~1 second sample rate! If monitoring some power systems, it would be useful, but for Aquaponics or Environmental sensors ~1 second sample is really overkill.
I’ve been thinking about it as well and agree. For me, longer term monitoring is likely much more useful. I can’t think of any time when I would want to collect 10 samples per second over a long period.
Something that might be more useful would be a fixed size buffer of the last N high-frequency samples that can be stored when a specified trigger event occurs. Like Pro Capture mode in OM System
Cameras. I don’t have a current use-case, however.
Thanks for thinking about it, good to know. Fast mode is designed primarily for realtime feedback when you’re setting conditions so, for example, you can see whether this amount of sound will trigger the email (because what does dB mean to a human?). Otherwise, I think it might only be useful for focused experiments, like measuring acceleration on an air cart (if anyone remembers doing that in physics class) or how quickly a particulate disperses.
I like the idea of capturing high-res data around an event, too. Shouldn’t matter for battery since it’s always sampling that fast. Will keep that in mind for the future, though I’d like to wait for real use cases. I’m sure you’ll come up with them once you experiment with the actual hardware!