The case is perfect if you want to hide the camera. You can find its alternatives without autofocus and/or with a small case. I selected an ELP USB Camera with 5MP resolution and autofocus, based on OV5640 CMOS chip. And if you decide to remove the security camera one day, a USB camera can be connected to any other computer, not just a Raspberry. A big advantage of USB cameras is that you might already have one at home with no use for it. It increased the security (avoiding Wi-Fi jamming) and transmission speed. This allowed me to eliminate Wi-Fi as I have Ethernet available indoor.
A USB cable then goes through a window indoor, where it connects to a Raspberry Pi board. It is the only component outdoor kept in a dummy case. Therefore I decided to try a USB camera instead.
A minor issue was a missing auto-focus – I was hoping to get a clearer picture of new close objects (e.g.
A reboot usually helped, but a security camera should reliably work 24×7. Sometimes the camera went dark and ocasionally the whole Pi board stopped communicating. This proved to be a problem during winter (sub-zero F). Its length was very limited without any possibility of extension, forcing me to keep all HW (Pi board, Wi-Fi, camera, SD card) in the same place outdoor. For me, however, the major issue was a CSI (Camera Serial Interface) used to connect the module to Raspberry Pi. At the time of writing this article you can already buy a newer version (v2) of this camera module supporting up to 8MP (3280 × 2464 pixels) for the same price as v1 – detailed HW specification comparison between v1/v2. In my setup I preferred a lower FullHD resolution (1600 x 1200 px) anyway, because the real-time transport by a Wi-Fi was too slow for big images. The quality of 5MP Raspberry Pi camera module (rev 1.3) is quite good, with the maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 px.
This is an update of my previous Security Camera project from the last year.
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