Built for outdoors
Built for the worst week
A sunny balcony in July is easy. The week that decides the design is a grey one in November, when the panel gives almost nothing and the battery has to carry everything. If the camera survives that week, the rest of the year takes care of itself.
Asleep until something moves
BalconyPatrol spends almost all its time asleep. A motion sensor keeps watch on a tiny amount of power, and the camera wakes in under a second when something moves. After a visit it naps lightly for a while, so a squirrel that comes straight back gets an instant response, then it drops into a deeper sleep once the balcony goes quiet.
Each visit gets a short burst of photos. If the animal is still busy, the burst continues; if it was only a branch in the wind, it stops. Dark or washed-out shots are thrown away on the device, so the battery never pays to send a photo nobody would look at.
Slowing down instead of switching off
When the battery runs low, the camera does not simply die. It takes fewer photos per visit, in a few gentle steps, and keeps enough in reserve to stay alive until the sun comes back. On a normal day none of this shows: the limits sit well above what a busy balcony needs, because a missed squirrel costs more than an extra photo.
The storm
The obvious way to know when to relax those limits is to ask the charger whether it is charging. A storm showed us why that is wrong. Under heavy cloud, a solar panel reports “charging” while delivering less power than the camera uses. Trust that, and the device drains itself flat while technically charging.
So the camera watches its battery instead. To choose the setting, we replayed a week of battery reports from our test balconies. The version we kept stayed out of the way every normal day and stepped in only on the day of the storm.
It updates itself, too
Improvements reach the camera on their own. Whenever it wakes, it checks in, and it only installs an update on a day with battery to spare, so a grey week never leaves it half-updated.
A year outside
Our first prototype has now lived outside for about a year, through a full Canadian winter, snow and rain.