wannabe | # 161 | 2011-01-10, 01:39 | Report

My apologies if this has been answered before, but I tried a lot to search for it and eventually had to open up an account here. You guys are great.
I was just wondering if anybody could help me with this problem that keeps occurring when I use Time Lapse. I think my phone restarts after I leave it to take pictures, I kept it beside me to watch what happens and as it beeps to take pictures sometimes the beep sound continues for about 2 to 3 seconds and later I found the phone was frozen so had to remove the battery since none of the keys worked.

I am a total noob, so I hope maybe somebody could help me with this. I thought it could be because it's still being worked on, but I guess some people have been successful using the application. Thanks.

0x4e84 | # 162 | 2011-03-10, 11:18 | Report

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.

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Last edited by 0x4e84; 2011-03-10 at 13:48. Reason: Further Info...

tpaixao | # 163 | 2011-03-11, 05:41 | Report

Hi

I've been busy with real life and had no time to think about TimeLapse or anything else.

Yes, I noticed that erratic behavior before and what you say makes a lot of sense. I noticed it before but it never occurred to me that it could be a memory leak - I always assumed that it was due to power saving. Knowing this, it should be really easy to fix (basically, there's an event loop where I'm probably declaring the same object over and over again).

Unfortunately, in a moment of rage due to the Nokia/Microsoft move, I uninstalled Qt from my development machine (yes, I was really upset ).
But I'll see if I reinstall it and try to fix this. If anyone cares to try to fix it and succeeds, please let us know.

Thanks for all the debugging


PS: You should be able to build it both in Windows and Linux. I used WIndows with MADDE. Someone else recently managed to build it in both windows and linux, recently.

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Last edited by tpaixao; 2011-03-11 at 05:43.

tecs | # 164 | 2011-10-25, 12:40 | Report

Great app you have there! Not to annoy or something but is there any progress on this project?

tpaixao | # 165 | 2011-10-26, 22:03 | Report

sorry, unfortunately no.
Everyone is welcome to check out the source code, though...

http://timelapse.garage.maemo.org/

gianko | # 166 | 2012-08-25, 11:29 | Report

is this guy having a similar issue? http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1186950

gianko | # 167 | 2012-08-26, 09:33 | Report

i tried the first script in the first page but it gives warning and no pictures are taken