This camera module can be a pretty neat project addition. It was
designed to be used in security systems and does two main things - it
outputs NTSC video and can take snapshots of that video and transmit
them over the TTL serial link. You can snap pictures at 640x480, 320x240
or 160x120 and they're pre-compressed JPEG images which makes them nice
and small and easy to store on an SD card. Perfect for a data-logging,
security, or photography project.
One nice thing about this particular camera is all the 'extras' that come with it. For example it has
manually adjustable focus, auto-white-balance, auto-brightness and
auto-contrast taken care of for you as well as
motion detection built in! That means you can have it alert your project when something moved in the frame.
Using the module is pretty easy and only requires two digital pins (or a
TTL serial port) - by default it transmits at 38400 baud but the baud
rate can be adjusted if you need to transmit the images faster. Of
course we wouldn't just leave you with a datasheet and a 'good luck',
we even spent a lot of time researching the module and DSP to make a really nice Arduino library with example code that shows how to change the image size and compression quality, detect motion, control the video output stream, etc.
We also have a very detailed tutorial that will help get the most use out of your camera.
