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Camera Expansion Module is Born!

A project log for ResQ Search and Rescue Tools

Air and ground-based tools to detect people by using their existing cell phone signature

eric-wiiliamEric Wiiliam 09/10/2020 at 12:470 Comments

Last night I made some time to do the development on the camera module. Although this is a totally optional expansion on the project- I did design this output in to the Gen2 PCBs. This module is actually key in a pretty huge possibility for the project as well (stay tuned for that this fall). Long story short:

ESP32 Cam boards are very cheap and will be triggered to capture a still image when a new MAC address (search target) is detected. This is pretty handy for an aerial search as you can have a downward facing still image of the area of interest to send ground teams to directly. Handy. This is the board:

Since all of them from eBay and Amazon seem to come with the pins already soldered I had to make my own case design so people dont have to desolder headers if they build this project- just drop it in the case.  In Fusion 360 I simply scaled the air/ground unit files again with the user parameters , added a couple holes and BAM:

So cool I learned how to do this from the adafruit tutorial. i did exactly ONE iteration to adjust the camera hole and add the SD card slot and this was the result 

Sooo happy!  The files are in Git but not added to the manuals/docs yet as I want to finalize the use case and hardware tests. I dont see any issues except maybe power supply.  Although this is strictly and optional expansion for ResQ- I think it will add a significant bit of functionality and under $15 USD cost. 

I even assembled my first kits to help others make this project

You can find them here: http://store.mkme.org/product-category/custom/

I ween. 

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