I’m trying to achieve Amazon Ring–level battery life — several months on a 5000 mAh battery — using non-custom SoMs. The device should stay almost at zero power between photo sessions.
So far, all tested platforms (ESP32-S3, ESP32-P4, AmebaPro2 RTL8735BDM, Luckfox RV1103) show deep-sleep consumption ≥ 70 mA, far above the advertised values, making them unsuitable.
We also tested a two-chip architecture (small MCU like ATtiny85 waking the main SoM), but the main issue is boot-to-first-photo time. It must be <1 second, which is hard with Linux-based SoMs — yet only Linux SoMs support proper MIPI sensors like IMX219/IMX708.
Questions:
– Has anyone achieved a low-power camera system (photo only) on an existing SoM, with real deep sleep or fast wake-up?
– Is designing a custom board around a SoC the only realistic solution?
– Or can something like Radxa CM3 + a highly optimized Linux stack (Buildroot, custom suspend modes) reach <1 s wake and low idle power?
– Has anyone successfully built a battery-powered MIPI-camera device with either deep sleep or a two-chip wake architecture?
