Arduino IPCam – Part 1 (The Circuit)

So i see its been forever since i have posted anything, figured its about time, and i wanted to show some of the stuff ive done with my Arduino. The first thing i tried to do with it was create my own budget IPCam with a webcam and some arduino parts.

Basic stuff that make up the IPCam:

• 2x Servo Motors
• 1x LCD (16×2)
• 1x LED
• 1x Potentiometer (used for LCD)
• Bits of random Meccano
• 2x Small lifting weights ( hey, we all knew i wouldnt use them to get in shape anyway )
• Tape/Glue/Random stuff

So first off, this is a hack, i havent done pretty much anything properly, i just pieced it together, tied in bits of code and got it working :)

This is what the circuit looks like:

The circuit is pretty simple and i basically just added all the things together from the examples found on arduino.cc

Next was the base which i used a lifting weight, i knew one day they would come in handy, the weights  look like this:

Which turns out is a perfect size to put my little servo motor to do the panning movement (its going to move the entire frame with the webcam on a circular axis), so i stacked two of them ontop of each other, threw a servo in the middle and applied lots of tape to a) smooth it out so that it doesnt catch when it rotates and b)hold the servo in place. It had to be heavy so that the entire frame didnt topple over with the weight of the frame when the webcam was attached. Ends up looking like this:

Finally for the frame, i put something together with simple Meccano (you should be able to get something better from other places, but i couldnt find anything else at the lego store ). Basically the frame had to have a some way of attaching a servo to a platform that allowed for some part of it to tilt up and down as well as being able to rotate on the base to do our ‘left’ and ‘right’ (its on an axis so its not really moving left and right). Obviously if you were interested in making it move you would need to construct a movable base to handle that.

The frame came out like this:

So my end product was the following:

Check out the next tutorials for the arduino code and the following one for the PHP interface!