Question: have a client that would love to have a better security camera
system. The existing video cameras produce grainy, sometimes useless,
images. We have all seen these images on TV of someone robbing a bank
or liquor store. Often the images are too poor to capture important
facial features of the perpetrator. Instead of a video camera, he
wants to use a quality 2 megapixel digital color still camera. With
some compression, the JPG files generated by the camera should only be
about 500KBs per shot. Perhaps the photos would be taken only when
there was movement in front of the camera, detected by some motion
sensor. When there was movement, the photos would be taken at a rate
of about 1 per second. I was thinking that the data could be fed to a
computer, using a large hard drive to store the images. Assuming
about 8 hours of photos with motion per day, a 160GB hard drive might
store about 10 days worth of photos. After 10 days, the files would
automatically be purged.
Has anyone heard of such a system? Are there any sources for just the
guts of a digital still camera?
Answer:Suppose you buy a camera, and make a 0.8mm pcb that fits in the
smartmedia-card slot (or whatever system the camera uses) with
a cable attached. A similar 0.8mm pcb + cable is made, and inserted
into a card-reader that is connected to a PC. Both cables connect
to a black box.
The black box holds some circuitry that switches a real smartmedia
card to the camera, or to the pc-cardreader, back and forth, between
taking snapshots. The PC controls the black box, connects the real
smartmedia-card to the camera, lets the camera take a snaphot which
is stored on the card. Then the card is connected to the reader,
PC copies the file from the card to the harddrive, erases the
file from the card, and switched the card back to the camera, and
everything starts all over again.
This only requires some simple pcb+cable to be made, a standard
off-the-shelf camera + standard off-the-shelf reader, and a
blackbox with relative simple electronics. No special knowledge
about camera or card protocols is required. If you start today,
you can have a prototype up and running within 2 weeks.
Interesting project!
