Question about Zumi-Camera-Performance-Drain

Timmytomate

Hello,
we started to work with the QR-Sensors just now and work on reading QR while driving on Line and communicating
with server while doing so etc.

Now we found out, opening and closing the cam all the time when taking pics does drain a lot of processing time.

Is there any disadvantage in keeping the camera on the whole time like performance in generall or quicker battery empty etc?

Thank you once again!
Really appreciate the support here and the whole team!

Greetings
Tim

robolink_leila

@timmytomate
Some things to note about the camera:

Using the camera draws a significant amount of power, almost the same amount as using the motors.
Importing the camera takes a long time so I would try to run that only once at the top of the notebook in its own cell.
You can use a smaller resolution frame to speed up detection time. Here are some examples of changing the resolution from our docs page.
Overall, the main disadvantage is that the camera drains battery really fast and uses a lot of ram/memory on the Pi Zero. Turning it off whenever possible by calling camera.close() will help save battery.