> But why not make a non-polished Windows app as well? Or have someone make it?
If I had more time and money I certainly would!
> Also, is the RAW data specific to the device and if so, why?
To maximize battery life, the hardware does zero processing on the image data; it simply copies the raw pixels output by the image sensor to the unformatted SD card.
> If the device simply used, say, DNG or TIFF, then decoding could be done by external software, and all your own software would have to do would be to read the SD card and produce RAW files...?
True, perhaps I should've used an existing RAW format like DNG and exposed the images as a filesystem. That would require using a different architecture (ie not using an MSP430, like Rinzler89 suggested), and would likely reduce the battery life due to having to maintain a filesystem on the SD card.
It seems it's the filesystem that's most costly? Would it be possible, maybe, to store DNG file data, one after the other, on the card, without a filesystem?
I'm not too familiar with the DNG format, but if a DNG file could be as simple as [header][2304x1296x2 bytes][footer] then it might be possible with the current hardware.
But without a filesystem, would it be useful to have DNG files stored on the SD card? Wouldn't you need special software to read off the "packed" DNG data anyway? And if you need special software anyway, couldn't the special software convert the existing raw image data to the DNG format, instead of requiring the hardware to do it?
It's unclear from the website what Photon Transfer does exactly, but from the screenshots it seems it's almost a Lightroom-lite?
A super basic utility that would simply extract the data from the device and spit out DNG files, with zero further processin, would not need to have a nice GUI, or even a GUI at all, and may be enough to lure in Windows users?
The DNG/TIFF spec is unreasonably flexible. It would be possible to add just a fixed precalculated header on the image data to make it valid DNG. The lack of filesystem is still a bigger issue.
If I had more time and money I certainly would!
> Also, is the RAW data specific to the device and if so, why?
To maximize battery life, the hardware does zero processing on the image data; it simply copies the raw pixels output by the image sensor to the unformatted SD card.
> If the device simply used, say, DNG or TIFF, then decoding could be done by external software, and all your own software would have to do would be to read the SD card and produce RAW files...?
True, perhaps I should've used an existing RAW format like DNG and exposed the images as a filesystem. That would require using a different architecture (ie not using an MSP430, like Rinzler89 suggested), and would likely reduce the battery life due to having to maintain a filesystem on the SD card.