First, our failures were not technical. We succeeded at creating a sub-$100 camera node that could be replicated and/or replaced quickly by relatively unskilled talent.
If I was going to do it all over again with the decade of engineering skills I've learned, I would look towards fabbing our own RTC I2C daughterboards and trying some GPIO-based approaches to triggering.
However, given our constraints, the solution I've described above worked incredibly well. I wouldn't be embarrassed to do it again.
I'm not saying you failed at the task, but that you tried a bunch of things along the way (that you've detailed in this thread) and they didn't work for whatever reason. That's valuable to know, it saves me time if I want to do something similar in the future. Plus, it's just nice to hear about the engineering of it all.
If I was going to do it all over again with the decade of engineering skills I've learned, I would look towards fabbing our own RTC I2C daughterboards and trying some GPIO-based approaches to triggering.
However, given our constraints, the solution I've described above worked incredibly well. I wouldn't be embarrassed to do it again.