HarveyH42,
sorry about that, I should have specified more details in my original post. My overall idea is to create a robot which follows a path as defined by the user on GUI. Of course, the robot will have other sensors (IR at the very least) as well as the capability to add on more sensors in the future to the system. My original idea (prior to proper research) was to have a live, high FPS video feed on the monitor, but I soon realized that was impossible with a PIC. Now, my plan is to implement a 1-2 FPS system using my JPEG UART camera module.
blueroomelectronics,
That's a good idea and I will give it a try, but are you suggesting that the math won't match the real world result? Because I know that the camera I am buying will produce JPEGs of less than 30kB size at 320x240, and ~15kB or less at 160x120. Assuming we're transferring at 115kbps = 14.37kBps, that's ~1FPS. That is, unless, something else bottlenecks the situation (either camera UART or the XBee data rate).
Edit:
I've found something that is similar to what I want to achieve :
**broken link removed**
They're using an XBee Pro system to transfer images to their GUI.Their processor is based on ARM7, which is more powerful than PIC as I understand, but they're also doing image processing and other cool features which are beyond the basics that I want to implement in my system.
Anyway, I thought this was a good find.
Edit2:
Another site, with a similar setup
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/secrets-of-the-c328. C328 camera (another model I was considering, $10 more expensive than my current one but seems to have same features, maybe the compression is better?), and what seems like non-Pro XBee modules (which run @ 85kbps rather than 115.2kbps). Their benchmarks:
JPEG, 128 byte package size
XBees + local microchip generating ACKs
640x480=10 seconds per frame
320x240=5 seconds per frame
160x128=0.7 seconds per frame