Hi,
I'm thinking about a project that would take a picture through my home's peephole whenever someone knocks on my door, and send this image via mail. My major difficulty is that the door is quite away from the arduino (it must be away due to constraints with other projects), so I don't have very clear which would be the best configuration/setup
As far as I can go, the part of the project that would be attached to the door would be:
the webcam or CMOS module.
some logic to decide when to take the picture (vibration, light, or sound).
"something" able to take the picture and transfer it to the arduino on the other side of the house.
On the other side, there would be an arduino able to receive the picture and mail it someone.
I've seen camera modules manageable by I2C, but I cannot see the whole setup... probably using 2 arduinos communicating between them? remotely taking pictures? wireless I2C ? any other idea?
Do you have any suggestions? I'd prefer to have only one Arduino in this setup. Thanks in advance!
You will probably need another microcontroller to do that. It does not have to be an Arduino, though. I have a few ATMega328p chips with the Arduino Uno bootloader at hand for these kind of tasks. They do not take up as much space as a "real" Arduino and are much cheaper as well.
There are commonly available wireless web cams which can do motion detection and send images by email and so on. I have one with an alarm input that could probably be triggered by a domestic doorbell with a little work. The main challenge I see would be finding one of these which was packaged in a way that was suitable to attach to the door. If you were determined, it would probably be possible to dismantle a conventional free standing wireless camera with the right features, and put it inside a suitable box to be mounted on the door. Maybe you will find one that is already packaged suitably if you look hard enough.
I am assuming you will be able to supply power to the camera.
The best solution IMO (easier and cheaper)
Raspberry PI+webcam+couple of sensors
You can attach sensors to the PI, it has some GPIO ports altough I dunno if it has Analog ones. If not, simply use Atmega328p connected to the PI (by i2c,spi or serial). A main program on the PI comunicates with the USB webcam and with the GPIO (program made on C++,C sharp, Java, python, proccesing or whatever that allow the handling of webcam and GPIO libraries) Raspberry PI connected to wifi can directly email you the picture.
(remember GPIO work at 3.3V and Atmega328p works at 5V)
And Ive read Cmos modules are a pain in the ass to setup with Arduino, Raspberry can handle images much faster and easier.
Thank you very much for your replies! all of them seem to point to a higher level solution, which is something that I have not had in account!!! but it is a very good idea to have a compact, pre-built IP camera. I've seen one able to stream video and detect motion for less than $40, which economically is better than the Raspberry solution. Yes, it's true that we loose the engineering spirit, but some times it seems better to follow the "don't reinvent the wheel" spirit.