I'm working on a Netduino based mobile robot that's controlled by software on a PC or phone (WP7). One goal of the project is to be able to steer the robot from another room of the house. Is there a small wireless (wifi) web cam that runs on battery that may work for this situation? I don't think the Netduino has enough processing power to stream video, though technially it could using a wifi shield. If that's out of the question would it be possible to sporatically take pictures using some other camera sensor & the Netduino (photos could be stored on the SD card and later served up over wifi to the client)?
Electronic – arduino – Wireless, battery operated web cam for mobile robot
arduinomobile robotnetduinovideo
Best Answer
I don't believe that the Netduino has the processing power that you want to stream video over the network. I believe that you could get any wifi webcam to work with the robot, though. You would just need a little extra space in your power budget to account for the camera's additional power usage.
Depending on how soon you need the camera, I would just watch the winter sales on any of the big technology suppliers (Newegg, Tigerdirect, Amazon) for a deal on a wifi webcam that meets the specifications that you are looking for.
If you are looking to make your project entirely self-contained, then you may want to check out the CMUcam. It provides a good vision sensor, without having to do much processing on your Netduino chip. It can do most basic vision processing on-board, without the need for your chip to handle the processor intensive image processing.