Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Wireless Security Camera
Ever saw these wireless security cameras that you can buy off the shelf? These are devices
that you can just put somewhere in your home or outside and connect them to your WiFi net-
work. After that, they automatically take pictures if some motion is detected, for example.
However, they are usually using the interface given by the manufacturer, which means you
are quite limited with what you can do with your camera.
In this chapter, we are going to build our own DIY version of such device. The project is
based on the Arduino Yun, to which we are going to connect a standard USB webcam and a
PIR motion sensor to create a nice Internet of Things application.
The application will be a modern version of a standard task that you expect from a security
camera: taking pictures when some motion is detected. The project will store pictures taken
by the USB camera on an SD card inserted into the Yun, but that is not all. Because we are
in a book about the Internet of Things, we also want these pictures to be automatically up-
loaded on a secure location. And that is exactly what we are going to do by uploading the
pictures to Dropbox at the same time.
