The best you might be able to do would be a cheap old laptop hooked to every camera that has USB. If you can get wifi and some power & weatherproofing for them it might work...but...that's still expensive.
zapped- 08-16-2007
The best you might be able to do would be a cheap old laptop hooked to every camera that has USB. If you can get wifi and some power & weatherproofing for them it might work...but...that's still expensive.
I beg to differ. This may be the EASIEST, but depending on your definition of best, other options may win out.
If you want to spend more time on it, and have a smaller solution with fewer parts that requires less electricity then how about rewriting firmware to include a driver for wireless ethernet card that you wire up to the camera. Or how about using a wireless router or access point.
Once we get further along with understanding the PV2 hardware registers, I think it would be doable to make a firmware mod that re-purposes the lines to the TFT display to interface with a wireless device of some sort. The PV2 would be made to take pictures when triggered by the motion sensor until it was full and then it would power on the wireless device and send the pictures on their way, delete pics from camera and power off the wireless device.
If anyone wants to see this happen, dig in to the PV2 firmware and hardware register discovery process and recruit some more people to do the same as well as some people to help by writing code to manage the firmware comments files and such.
I have not looked into it, but if there were a wireless router that could function as a USB host (or be hacked to do so) then you could just plug the camera into the USB port of the router. Maybe a network attached storage device that allows connection of USB drives would be the easiest.
bobbarker- 08-16-2007
I've seen many routers modified to carry webcams. Find a few cheap enough and some good priced webcams and it still might cost some money, but it'd work.
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/AddUsbWebcam
That's probably the best example I can find.
texaspyro- 08-16-2007
I would use an old(ish) laptop that can run off of a 12V car/motorcycle battery, web cam, wifi card. Probabaly the cheapest/easiest way to do it. One can get an awful lot of laptopage for a few hundred bucks these days. Way less than $1500 bucks. Heck, for $600 bucks you can get a new laptop with camera and wifi and Bill Gates nannygoat OS.
MrBeReady- 12-27-2007
Re: Wireless hack ideas needed for SD cards Anyone have any idea or a lead to another forum as to how someone can hack something ethernet to the camera instead of a SD card?
http://www.eye.fi/ is an SD card with built in wifi. It will transfer jpegs but not movie clips (.avi). Limited range will be an issue since your cameras are so spread out.