Hi,

Owner of a N900 since January, I have read this thread with great interest.
The Perl script works fine, but I'm missing some controls, notably for the focus, exposure time, etc.
Therefore, I find the "FCameraTL" application very useful, and I really appreciate the work that tpaixao has put into this tool! Kudos to you!!

However, I have some stability issues with timelapse-0.17-1, like others do. Yesterday evening and the day before, I did an attempt to use it (20 seconds interval over an hour) and it sort of stalled after 23 pictures the first day, 25 on the second day. I had configured the program to play beeps after each picture, and I could notice that after a while, the sound was sometimes played, sometimes not, or was very distorted. I also noticed the sound of the lens focusing process, happening randomly, during this hour. Interestingly, upon inspection, the pictures stopped to be saved exactly at the 22:59 to 23:00 transition, in both cases... Probably a coincidence, but an interesting one nonetheless (time-dependent instability??)...

I'll make further experiments, to see if I can observe some kind of pattern. Oh, by the way, I don't have any "power kernel" installed. Just plain fremantle 1.3...

I have now also downloaded the source code for timelapse-0.17-1, as well as the FCam API source code... I first have to find out how to build the program by myself, and then I might be able to experiment and try finding some fixes... But I start from scratch when it comes to experience with gstreamer and the FCam API, so this might take a while until I make any progress. Is there a prefered platform for building the app? I have access to both Windows and Linux, with the latest Qt SDK (1.1 Beta).

tpaixao, do you still maintain this program? Any clue about this instability issue? Or anyone else?

Thanks in advance, and big thanks again for the involvement! The N900 is a wonderful platform for this kind of experiment, and I'm glad to be able to work on it too now!!

0x4e84

Edit: I just did another try, with 20s intervals: This time the phone shut down altogether while writing the 50th picture (size is smaller than other dng files). Just a thought: Could it be some kind of memory leak in FCam or TimeLapse, that ends up eating up the whole available memory and causing the application (and eventually phone) to crash?...

Edit2: I can now confirm the memory leak scenario... I have repeated my 20s-delay snapshot series, while running a "mem-monitor" in a xterm window. The system memory usage was 19% at the start, and steadily grew, picture after picture... Upon reaching 50%, a "BgKill" signal appeared in the mem-monitor report, indicating that some background process was killed to keep the memory usage within reasonable limits (if I understood correctly). The memory usage then rose still a bit more (up to 59%), where the TimeLapse application stopped saving any picture.