So comparable to a smartphone under load. That's a pretty good power budget, given that most of the components you mentioned (except RAM/SoC) are going to be operated intermittently.
> sensor
Serious question: you mean image post-processing and encoding here? I thought CMOS sensors themselves have negligible power demands?
> heaters
A crypto miner is just that - an overcomplicated heater. If you include one, you don't need the other.
> How much computing power do you really think you can get with that?
Not much, though an ASIC would get a nice multiplier on it. I'd guesstimate it to be comparable to a cryptominer running in the browser of an unsuspecting regular person - who will typically have a cheap, underpowered machine that can barely lift the OS and the browser without hanging. In recent years, at least some people thought you can make a profit with it, because we've seen such web cryptominers deployed around the web.
My point isn't that it's happening - I fully expect the cost of sourcing a miner ASIC and redesigning a camera around it to be much larger than the mining it would bring in any reasonable timeframe. But I think that on first look, it's possible, if someone tried hard enough, to build a sneaky security camera like this, that would be able to eventually yield some profit if deployed wide enough.
So comparable to a smartphone under load. That's a pretty good power budget, given that most of the components you mentioned (except RAM/SoC) are going to be operated intermittently.
> sensor
Serious question: you mean image post-processing and encoding here? I thought CMOS sensors themselves have negligible power demands?
> heaters
A crypto miner is just that - an overcomplicated heater. If you include one, you don't need the other.
> How much computing power do you really think you can get with that?
Not much, though an ASIC would get a nice multiplier on it. I'd guesstimate it to be comparable to a cryptominer running in the browser of an unsuspecting regular person - who will typically have a cheap, underpowered machine that can barely lift the OS and the browser without hanging. In recent years, at least some people thought you can make a profit with it, because we've seen such web cryptominers deployed around the web.
My point isn't that it's happening - I fully expect the cost of sourcing a miner ASIC and redesigning a camera around it to be much larger than the mining it would bring in any reasonable timeframe. But I think that on first look, it's possible, if someone tried hard enough, to build a sneaky security camera like this, that would be able to eventually yield some profit if deployed wide enough.