Posts: 11,411
Threads: 200
Joined: Feb 2011
Originally, the LRT PRO Timer wasn’t designed for super short intervals, and also absolute "precision timing" was also not on my agenda.
With this type of hardware—where on one hand you want to save power, but on the other hand you need high reliability—you often have to make compromises.
Some background on the topic: The OLED in particular takes a relatively long time to refresh. But if the timer is supposed to remain operable between shots—e.g., to display times in “real time”—then the OLED has to be updated regularly (much more often than once per second, especially at short intervals). Yet a single update can take a hefty 112 ms. So, you can probably imagine that you have to plan very carefully when these updates happen—especially if you’re working with 200 ms intervals and also need to account for camera triggering time, etc.
Up till now, display updates ran independently of the main processes, so they could delay triggering. That’s what user “Keksi” noticed in another thread. He also came across a bug where 0.25-second intervals were shown as 0.2 seconds because the display only took one decimal place into account. I fixed that as well in this beta.
Even though those small inaccuracies didn’t really affect the final results, the topic piqued my interest, and I wanted to see if I could do better.
And yes, I think I’ve succeeded.
Here’s a beta version you can download—please test it as thoroughly as possible and give me feedback. The timing should now be pretty accurate. Operation during shooting may feel somewhat slower as a result, but I think the priority clearly should be on timing accuracy and battery consumption.
I hope nothing else broke in the process of making all these changes. If you notice anything, please let me know.
For the LRT PT3:
https://lrtimelapse.com/files/lrt-pro-ti...ware-beta/
For the LRT PT2.5:
https://lrtimelapse.com/files/lrt-pro-ti...ware-beta/
These are the Release-Notes:
With this type of hardware—where on one hand you want to save power, but on the other hand you need high reliability—you often have to make compromises.
Some background on the topic: The OLED in particular takes a relatively long time to refresh. But if the timer is supposed to remain operable between shots—e.g., to display times in “real time”—then the OLED has to be updated regularly (much more often than once per second, especially at short intervals). Yet a single update can take a hefty 112 ms. So, you can probably imagine that you have to plan very carefully when these updates happen—especially if you’re working with 200 ms intervals and also need to account for camera triggering time, etc.
Up till now, display updates ran independently of the main processes, so they could delay triggering. That’s what user “Keksi” noticed in another thread. He also came across a bug where 0.25-second intervals were shown as 0.2 seconds because the display only took one decimal place into account. I fixed that as well in this beta.
Even though those small inaccuracies didn’t really affect the final results, the topic piqued my interest, and I wanted to see if I could do better.
And yes, I think I’ve succeeded.
Here’s a beta version you can download—please test it as thoroughly as possible and give me feedback. The timing should now be pretty accurate. Operation during shooting may feel somewhat slower as a result, but I think the priority clearly should be on timing accuracy and battery consumption.
I hope nothing else broke in the process of making all these changes. If you notice anything, please let me know.
For the LRT PT3:
https://lrtimelapse.com/files/lrt-pro-ti...ware-beta/
For the LRT PT2.5:
https://lrtimelapse.com/files/lrt-pro-ti...ware-beta/
These are the Release-Notes:
Code:
Firmware 32 beta 2
- Fixed upload, please don't use beta 1!
Firmware 32 beta 1
- Improvement: Complete rework of the timing mechanism for AF, shutter, ramping, wakeup etc and synchronization with the OLED refresh (which itself takes a lot of time). Especially with short intervals the timing will be as accurate as possible and not delayed by screen refreshs anymore. This also means that while shooting, manual operations like in the shooting menu will have lower priority and lag a bit, but I think the most important is, that the camera release is the most accurate as possible.
- Fix: 0.25 Secs interval (the minimum possible) would display rounded as 0.2 Secs
- Reduced the minimum Dark Time to 150ms, in order to allow 0.2 Secs interval (AF-Time needs to be 0 and release time 50 in the settings). Not many cameras support this!
- Added 0.25 Secs interval to the chooser, when applicable (see above)
