A system that takes photos and upload them to the web.

Boy1

What you want to create already exists. A motion sensing camera for nature observation or hunting. They even sell them at Walmart. Just search for "hunting camera," "IR motion triggered camera," or "game camera."

Connect the camera wirelessly, which some have the option, to your server. This is a very common practice with security equipment.

Cabe

http://twitter.com/Cabe_e14

Boy1

What you want to create already exists. A motion sensing camera for nature observation or hunting. They even sell them at Walmart. Just search for "hunting camera," "IR motion triggered camera," or "game camera."

Connect the camera wirelessly, which some have the option, to your server. This is a very common practice with security equipment.

Cabe

http://twitter.com/Cabe_e14

Thanks, Cabe.

What I want to do is more than just a motion-triggered camera though. The main purpose for the camera would be to take a photo when an unauthorized card is read by an RFID reader. I'll use motion-baseed photos also at times though. So, I want a system that is versatile and receptive to the different parameters that I may want to feed into it.

Thanks.

I would then take the hunting cameras and trigger the camera under certain circumstances. However, getting the unauthorized card entry picture might be difficult, unless you are also designing that part as well.

The hunting cameras have remote triggering. So, I would take a devboard, or build a circuit, to handle all the other possible trigger events. Then the board would send off a trigger command.

I recommend a PIC based board, but Arduino would be easy to work with as well.

Cabe

Interesting work around. I was actually planning on working with the Arduino IDE and a processor running the arduino bootloader. For the RFID reaer, I was thinking about using a Parallax RFID reader.

The device I want to build must be small and cost-effective. I'm not sure buying and adding a stand-alone camera to the system would allow me to achieve that. If I were able to add the camera module itself to a custom PCB and control it through the arduino IDE, that would solve my problem. Any extra help is welcomed.

Hi,

I see two possible approaches which could fulfil your requirements (I have in mind that your time spent on this also has its price... and we are talking here about few devices, right ?).

The first approach would be to take a digital camera with SD memory card slot and insert wi-fi network card into it (see: http://www.eye.fi). Many cameras have input for external triggering, where a transistor and a resistor or two can do the job - ask uncle Google for particular triggering solutions according to selected camera. Else, you can consider opening the camera and connecting your wires directly to shooter button.

If you have security concerns about web storage and access to your uploaded photos, you might go with the second approach.

This second approach would be to use a digital OEM camera. Please be aware that several cameras on the market have poor documentation. They could be very cheap (they are typically mobile phones surplus parts), but you might get grey trying to squeeze something out of them. Check forums before any purchase.

Nevertheless, my selection here would be OEM camera with serial port and onboard JPEG compression engine. I would definitely avoid SPI, I2C, etc. interface unless you obtain detailed documentation and (most importantly) can locate positive experience feedbacks from several engineers.

This is about camera and at this point you get into your Arduino board picture stream. Uploading it to a web server should not be a problem, I hope...

Best wishes, Ivan Zilic