Thanks for the suggestions! The compression is an interesting idea. It's been a while since I touched the FPGA RTL but I think there might be space to fit something like that.
Related to compression -- a dirty little Photon secret is that currently, the 12-bit RAW pixels are written as 16-bit words, so 25% of the SD card (the high 4 bits of every pixel) is actually zeroes. So an easy compression win is to compact those pixels, and we'll go from being able to store 20k photos to 27k photos, and spend less time writing the photos (like you said) which should translate to longer battery life.
It would be interesting to quantify what the biggest consumer of power is while capturing a photo. I'm honestly not sure what the power breakdown would look like (image sensor vs SDRAM vs SD card vs ICE40).
Related to compression -- a dirty little Photon secret is that currently, the 12-bit RAW pixels are written as 16-bit words, so 25% of the SD card (the high 4 bits of every pixel) is actually zeroes. So an easy compression win is to compact those pixels, and we'll go from being able to store 20k photos to 27k photos, and spend less time writing the photos (like you said) which should translate to longer battery life.
It would be interesting to quantify what the biggest consumer of power is while capturing a photo. I'm honestly not sure what the power breakdown would look like (image sensor vs SDRAM vs SD card vs ICE40).