Webcam interfacing

[nampu]

hi everybody

I have some queries regarding a project i am doing in my college with a group of friends. We need to take a pictures of a room in a building at regular intervals, and send the picture over to a PC in a cetralised location( a lab).The building has good ethernet connectivity so we decided to use a AT91SAM9263 or AT91SAM7x256 for this purpose. The former has a usb host as well as ethernet while the latter has ethernet . The part of transfering the picture is transferred from the room to the PC is relatively clear. We do not know what we should do to get the picture of the room. Our budget allows us to use a normal web camera but is there a way to interface the webcam with the microcontroller so that it takes a picture of the room (not a video) and sends it to the PC. Please give us any suggestions you may have.
thanks in advance

 

[dknguyen]

Webcams seem to be a bit more difficult to interface with since they use USB and it seem you have to be able to get a hold of the USB protocal. Your microcontroller must also support being a USB host which can be rare.

I've only ever heard of successful implenetations that use microprocessors (which more widely support USB hosting and can use operating systems more akin to how the webcam is normally used) rather than microcontrollers

I would suggest something like this which might be easier to use since you have less digging to do:
**broken link removed**

It matters little though if you can get the USB protocal for the webcam (each webcam has a different one) from the manufacturer.