I am a mechanical engineer just getting into arduino's and other than a couple circuits classes I do not have much experience with the electrical side of things. I have an arduino uno, bluesmirf gold and a usb web cam and was curious if there was anyway to connect the web cam to the arduino which would be connected to the bluesmirf and then my computer. I have searched the forums but cant seem to find anything. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Are you seriously trying to tell us that you googled (or used the forum search function) for "arduino webcam" and -did not- see the tons of threads telling you how the Arduino doesn't have the speed, the drivers, or the memory to read the data from a webcam, let alone process it or store it, or even to act as a "pass-thru"?
Note that this is with the current Arduino hardware - if/when the newer Arduinos come out that are based on 32-bit processors, it will likely be a completely different story. But as of today, it is basically a no-go.
There is only one way I can think of that you might have a snowball's chance: That would be to use a Mega 2560 with a RAM expansion shield, and for you or someone else to have the hacking chops to build (or buy) a USB master shield (to plug the camera into) and write the driver software necessary for it to stream the data over bluesmirf device (you won't be able to store the images - not enough SRAM, even on the Mega); even so, the frame-rate would probably be awful.
anyway to connect the web cam to the arduino...
Generally speaking, no.