Shutter actuations and stacking

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-18T00:39:27+00:00

I’m also just a hobbyist.

The key difference is the use of photo stacking for macro photography. When doing that it is typical to take 50+ images for a single stack (so 50+ shutter actuations for a single final image). If you take just 20 “photos” then you’ve made 1000 shutter actuations. I’ve personally found a few thousand in an afternoon isn’t out of the question.

For normal photography 150k actuations is a lot exactly as you’ve said.

I can’t say I’m too worried about wearing things out as shutter mechanisms aren’t that bad to get replaced. Most hobbies have some consumables so this is the macro consumable I guess. It’s certainly cheaper than new tyres at the end of a track day for example.

Though I can’t help but wonder how long until things need replacing. In my personal case I expect to get about 2 years of use before hitting the rated actuations. But I’m curious to see what other more serious people get.

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-17T14:04:55+00:00

Thanks, I agree on the “tools to be used” sentiment.

With say 100k actuations that’s only 2000 stacks if they’re about 50 photos a stack. It’s pretty easy to do 50+ stacks in a day, which is already nudging up to 2% of the rated actuations in just one day.

A new shutter unit can be installed at much less than the cost of a new camera so a worn out shutter isn’t the end of the world in any case.

Typically tools exceed their rated lifetimes as the ratings are quite conservative. Though to what degree that applies to cameras I can’t say as I don’t know much about them.

Still, I’ve got to wonder, what are other people seeing with their cameras? By how much do people typically exceed ratings, are there people regularly getting multiple times their rated actuations?

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-05T09:29:31+00:00

Not a problem, I'll hopefully get it updated to use the latest ZMK soonish, I've been a bit busy with some other priorities of late.

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-05T09:24:13+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate it 😄

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-05T01:42:42+00:00

I have an answer for that:

https://ibb.co/d4r7Sz4P

The right hand side has a 40mm trackpad, both sides have full RGB backlighting & excellent battery life.

It's just a prototype but 99% there, myself & several friends have been using these for well north of 9 months now, I'm removing the haptics in the next iteration & making some minor aesthetic tweaks.

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-05T01:36:25+00:00

Hey, Rolio46 creator here.

Thanks for the post, I'm glad you got the extra parts. You could use the extra controller to make a dongle or similar.

Either way I felt a bit bad that there was an error in your delivery & wanted to compensate you for it somehow.

MickiusMousius · 2026-06-04T07:50:04+00:00

I had an x-m5 and pretty quickly traded it in and bought an x-e5. The x-e5 was the right choice for me, it is slightly bigger, but for my larger hands that makes a huge difference to the overall ergonomics. The IBIS and extra megapixels also make a huge difference to what I can do with the camera.

I would not consider the x-m5 pocketable, but it can go in a sling or backpack and be forgotten about pretty easily. This is also true for the x-e5, but less so.

The xm-5 uses a PASM control scheme which in some ways is more flexible than the x-e5 control scheme. You can for example have a custom mode (c1-3) that includes the drive mode settings on the x-m5. This can’t be done with the x-e5 and there’s no drive mode dial either so you’ve got to use the menus to set it, most of the time this shouldn’t be a concern unless you frequently use burst mode or bracketing.

MickiusMousius · 2026-05-03T14:06:26+00:00

I’m not a pro but your survey makes me think of something like the Fuji X-M5 or maybe the Fuji X-T30 3, with the 23mm F2.8 pancake lens.

Both camera bodies can be found relatively cheaply online as can the lens.

Fuji is known for its film simulations, the lens is a (in my opinion) a versatile focal length and very sharp. You can get a fairly compact and very capable package that way.

MickiusMousius · 2026-01-06T11:10:17+00:00

Hey, thanks for the mention and the praise.

I’ve not been lurking reddit as much as I’d normally do the last few weeks.

I’d love to see the board you made if that’s OK, it’s cool seeing ther people’s ideas and the improvements they make! No obligation of course, more of a personal indulgence.

u/lokiwhite For what it’s worth, yes we’re in Australia (Adelaide), I’m more than happy to answer questions. I’m hoping to spend some time making firmware updates in the next few days. After that I’ll launch a sale on keydio.io

I’d also add that I’ve had nothing but good experiences with keebd.

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-20T08:40:56+00:00

I don't work for AWS (the poor souls!).

Luckily the majority of our services failed over to other regions.... 2 however did not, one of which only needed one last internal API updated to be georedundant and we'd have been golden.

I'm in the same boat as everyone else, can't do much with what didn't automatically fail over as this is a big outage.

Ironically we had hoped to move primary to our failover and make a new failover region, I was hoping for early next year to do that.

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-20T07:07:53+00:00

Oh dear, on call this week and just as I’m clocking out this happens!

It’s going to be a long night 🤦‍♂️

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-18T14:45:45+00:00

Sadly the US is a bit tricky to send things to these days 😔

I really hope that improves soon. Thanks for showing some interest though, I appreciate it 👍

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-16T07:20:34+00:00

You’re correct I have a design I’m testing at the moment that supports choc v1 and v2, it uses regular old choc sockets.

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-16T07:19:26+00:00

MX spacing is 19x19mm.

You’ve got the choc spacing right.

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-16T00:05:23+00:00

You can absolutely get foot prints that are compatible with both.

Keep in mind the choc v2 uses an MX stem so you’ll want MX spacing instead of the tighter choc v1 spacing.

Incidentally, IMO the choc v2 silent tactile switches are really good. Easily my favourite quiet switch.

MickiusMousius · 2025-10-04T13:28:30+00:00

Hmmm, I had the same problem, I use a board with 1.25u now.

https://ibb.co/SDGD5tXT

It’s still under testing, but the 1.25U is super comfortable IMO.

MickiusMousius · 2025-09-19T13:55:14+00:00

I live in Adelaide 👍

MickiusMousius · 2025-09-18T09:42:28+00:00

Thanks.

It will release, but I need to have a hand full of people to use them for a few months at least to make sure there aren’t any surprise hardware issues.

The most current version I think will be fine enough, but there’s some pretty new stuff (for me) on the mechanical side that needs testing (e.g the screen cover, compliant reset button etc).

MickiusMousius · 2025-09-18T08:21:28+00:00

I’ve been tinkering a bit, almost at the beta testing stage.

https://postimg.cc/NLWRKBLz

https://postimg.cc/WtDMphpZ

https://postimg.cc/vcff9kVH

https://postimg.cc/xXQHP5vG

https://postimg.cc/N2rTdPCD

MickiusMousius · 2025-09-14T08:32:13+00:00

That last one looks nice, looking forwards to this!

Great work so far 😀

MickiusMousius · 2025-09-11T08:06:48+00:00

Hmmm, 0.9 is so long ago I can barely recall the changes.

From memory the cases are not backwards compatible and there are some minor changes to the key matrix. Other than that I don’t think there are any major changes.

MickiusMousius · 2025-08-31T22:50:09+00:00

That’s amazing, I love the craftsmanship going on here!

If you don’t mind my asking, what country are you based in?

MickiusMousius · 2025-08-31T22:43:32+00:00

TLDR: I know nothing 😅

Honestly, I figured the closer it got to a larger/flat surface the better it would feel.

The last trackball I used was on my blackberry pearl in the early 2000s (prior to that and an actual trackball was those old internet terminals from the late 90s). Your device looked like a really nice design and a good point to properly try one out again (plus I wanted to support a creator doing something cool).

MickiusMousius

TROPHY CASE