The DigiBall is talking to _something_, right?
The core concept of the DigiBall is that it connects to your smart phone, which almost everyone is assumed to already have on their person at all times.
Extra hardware breaks that model, so it needs to break it for a good reason.
There are all sorts of cameras, home security for example, that operate on batteries for months. I would see this more useful for tournament tours and things like that, which wouldn't want a permanent mount. Motion detection in cameras is an extremely established technology.
The home security cameras have very low power optical triggers built into the sensor, and they are essentially in sleep mode until a cell is activated. They then wake up and record video, stop recording when there is no more optical flow detected in the ISP, and transmit the video to a server. Then they go back to sleep. Most of the time they are sleeping and consuming very little power.
I think that for our application we need a constantly running camera, i.e. active ISP, that is always using optical flow to detect ball motion, with code smart enough to differentiate it from moving heads and cues. This will drain the battery quickly, so you just need a larger battery, or a constant power feed.
We won't be able to convince ASIC manufacturers to front us millions of dollars to modify their sensors to sleep on a different patterns. We are at the mercy of using the available hardware capabilities.
