Chapter 3. Making Your Own Cloud-connected Camera
In this project, we are going to build a security camera that automatically uploads pictures to the Web. We will connect a camera to the Arduino Yún board, and use its powerful features to control this camera easily and upload pictures to the Web. What we are going to build is a system that can detect motion, and if some motion is detected, can automatically take a picture and save it both on the local SD card attached to the Yún board and to a cloud storage; in our case, Dropbox. We are also going to make the camera stream a video live on a private YouTube feed.
Let's see what we are going to do in this project in more detail:
- First, we are going to build the hardware part of the project with a typical USB camera, a PIR motion sensor, and one SD card.
- Then, we will write some code to test all the hardware connections of the project. We'll check whether the motion sensor is working correctly and try to take a picture with the camera while it is connected to the Arduino Yún board.
- After testing the hardware, we are going to build the first application, which captures pictures whenever some motion is detected and automatically stores these pictures on the SD card.
- Right after building this simple local application, we are going to connect the project to the cloud. The project will do the same as in the earlier case, take pictures when some motion is detected, but this time the pictures will also be uploaded to your Dropbox folder. This way, the pictures can be seen in real time from anywhere, as you can log in to Dropbox from any web browser.
- Finally, we are going to stream a video to the Web, so you can always check what's going on in your home from a mobile phone or tablet, wherever you are in the world. For this application, we are going to install a streaming library on the Yún board and make it continuously stream a video over Wi-Fi. This stream will be acquired by your computer and sent to YouTube via a dedicated software. On YouTube, we will then be able to access this live stream just as you would watch a typical YouTube video.