Camera shot on charger connection

Somebody came to me with an idea whether a cheap Android phone can be turned into an automatic camera. Some external sensor would send a signal to the phone and the phone would take a picture automatically. We started to discuss the possible connection of the external sensor and an interesting idea came up: the charger connection.

Android delivers an event whenever the charging power is connected or disconnected: can it be used to send a binary signal to an application in a very simple way, without fiddling with Bluetooth or USB?

Click here to download the example application.

You have to start the application once. Then whenever you connect the charger, it takes a picture. When the application is in the foreground, a preview is shown but as long as the application is active (not destroyed) it works from the background too.

Here are the experiences:

• On my high-end device the application reacted quickly to charger connection, the reaction time from connecting the charger to the camera shot was less than a second. But when the application was tested on the very low-end Android target device, the picture was much less rosy: the delay increased to 3-4 seconds, effectively making the solution unusable.
• In order for this application to work, it has to be started at least once manually. This pretty much kills all unattended use cases.
• The shutter sound is almost impossible to remove. Update: on certain devices (Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 confirmed) there is no shutter sound in silent mode.

The takeaway for us was to reject the idea. But I share the example program anyway, maybe it can be useful for somebody.

One last thing. View our video about our Bluetooth Low Energy sensor application prototype and help us win the "We Know RFDuino" contest!