Hey guys I've just started with the arduino and have a project I want to do with it I was wondering if it was viable with this hardware.
Using a Panasonic BL-C1 Camera (Which has an ethernet connection)
A Ethernet Arduino Shield
A Wi-Fi Arduino shield
I want to take a picture on the Camera which will be connected to the ethernet shield, I then want to transfer the image from the Ethernet to the Wi-FI and too a server. Would this be possible with this hardware? I don't need a fast rate even 1 image every 5 seconds would be ok.
As the arduino hasn't enough memory to buffer a whole image it will depend on if you can get the image from your camera in small enough chunks. This sort of thing is always tricky on such a small controller.
Yeah I had noticed that on a few things off a google search,
Would you say it would be easier to add an SD Card and store the image to that then sending it off or to try and get the camera to send it in smaller chunks and stream it through?
Is the limitation just that the arduino can't handle the image size or does that affect the WI-Fi shield aswell? i.e could I bypass the arduino and use the Wi-Fi shield to make the IP camera work like an IP Camera?
I think that what Mike meant is that it depends on how you can acces the image in the camera. If you can get the image out of the camera in small chunks, then you could do something like :
get a little chunk of the picture
send it over ethernet
start over
But you should probably not expect a very usable framerate with that approach.
if you can only get the whole image from the camera in one large chunk, then the memory limitations in Arduino would prevent you from doing anything with it, simply because you have no where to buffer it before sending it on over the ethernet connection.
Yes that is what I was getting at.
The problem with trying to shuffle it straight onto SD card is that it is coming in over Ethernet faster than you can write it to the card so it has to go somewhere.
One possibility might be to add extra memory to the arduino, this is easer done with the mega as there are ports with hardware support for this. However, you have to determine how much memory you will need even so. Remember this is only an 8 bit processor so direct memory access space is only 64K. You can of course get into bank switching but that adds another layer of complexity onto things.