NEW PRODUCT – Miniature TTL Serial JPEG Camera with NTSC Video « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

NEW PRODUCT – Miniature TTL Serial JPEG Camera with NTSC Video. This tiny little camera module can be a pretty neat project addition, it is just like our other JPEG cameras (same chipset/software), but much smaller and slimmer. It was designed to be used in security systems and does two main things – it outputs NTSC color video and can take snapshots of that video (in color) and transmit them over the TTL serial link. You can snap pictures at 640×480, 320×240 or 160×120 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 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. The lens is manually adjustable, it has a 1-15 meter focal distance by default which is good for most projects.

We also carry a much larger, but enclosed weather-proof version

Using the module is pretty easy and only requires two digital pins (or a TTL serial port) – by default it transmits at 38400 baud. 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.

Example photo 1 (outside street) & example photo 2 (inside person)

Note: We have these working great with classic Arduino UNOs (and other Atmega328-based ‘duinos) but they are not yet MEGA compatible.