Small camera controlled with arduino.

Projects General Guidance
1

Hello,

I am working on crawler and main PCB is based on ATMega1284p.
I want to add a camera to this tank which will be able to take a photo or record short video. These actions must be controlled with ATMega1284.
So MCU will just send signal (with a cable) and camera will take a picture and save it to camera's internal SD card.

And this is where I need some help.

  • what small and cheap camera should I choose for this purpose?
  • how can ATMega chip communicate with this camera?

I found many cheap cameras for this but all where based on wifi-communication and I don't want these because I want to make it very power efficient. So camera will be turned off or in stand-by mode most of the time.

2

Have you considered the new Raspberry Pi camera?

You could use a Raspberry Pi Zero to host the camera and control it with the Arduino using GPIO to GPIO connections. (Watch for voltage differences).

3

The ESP32-Cam has a micro SD Card slot and is very cheap.

...R

4

Thanks for reply.

Both Raspberry Pi Zero and ESP32-Cam are good for this but they are quite power hungry (>150mA) and they have much features which I will not use (WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, high CPU speed..).
Now I have ESP32-CAM as a last choice if I don't find anything better and more power efficient.

5

You can power-down the Raspberry and auto-start the camera on power up.