Xiaomi Yi does not do real 2 pics/s without hack

Contributing and equipment
1

Some time ago I posted Wrong: Xiaomi Yi doing 1 pic/0.5 without hacks I gladly posted, that now the Xiaomi YI supports 2 images/s. I was wrong: It have been doing it all the time, but with a big BUT: For 1 and 2 images / second the camera only measures the exposure at the first images. So if the environment becomes lighter or darker during the trip (which it usually does), then those images are highly over or under exposed.

For some people there is a hack, where you have a script that essentially presses the shutter button. It crashes my cameras, so it does not work for me.

What does it mean? GoPro is imho the best Mapillary camera without GPS. But Xiaomi YI is much cheaper and provides a very nice image, so it is at the top for me.

2

All I can tell, the Huawei Honor 7 mobile phone is a great mapillary tool, too.
With new versions it does 20 MP every sec, or faster.
I tried with 8MP and it made every 3/10 sec a picture…

currently you can also choose 8 mP with latest mapillary, but will be fixed soon.

echelon

3

Hi tryl !

I didn’t try it as the standard script works for me (very rare crashes with 8MP pictures), but in your timelapse script, you could test to add “t app key shutter_rel”

The script will be

sleep 10
#MAIN LOOP
while true
do
t app key shutter
t app key shutter_rel
sleep 1
done

And don’t forget the empty last line.

4

Thanks @StephaneP, but it didn’t improve. When using your script unmodified, the camera would take a picture every 2 seconds. If I changed 1 to 0.5 it would crash quickly. I guess I just have a hardware version that does not perform as well as others.

5

Just redid the test, and your script actually gives med 1 pic/sec, @StephaneP!! In the first test I had not disabled timelapse in the settings, so it did not work. I still need to do the stability test though.

I use
sleep 0.8, because it would some time skip a second with 1. sleep 0.5 is not better, so I’ll just let the camera sleep. I’ll be back with the stability test.

Update: It failed :frowning:
After a few minutes the script stop running - I tried twice. Now I could try to use sleep 1 or 1.2, but I don’t want to push the camera so hard, that I am a few milliseconds from it failing. Better get a picture every 2 seconds all the way than none.

Thanks for the advice. It may very well work for other hardware revisions of Xiaomi Yi.

6

Hi @tryl !
During my tests I found a new way to make timelapse that rarely crash on my Yi:

An advice: disable the beeps :smile:

1 Like
8

Thanks, I will try it when the kids allow it :slight_smile: