Hi all, First, I’m just starting out. “Discovered” Arduino about a month and a half ago and have become so addicted to physical computing it makes a heroin addiction seems like a mild craving for something salty in comparison.
I’m a self taught software engineer with a 2 year pre-engineering degree, all of my electronics knowledge is self-taught as well and is scattered all over the place. One cool aspect of Sparkfun’s site and Adafruit’s is how their tutorials end up tying together all of the various bits and and pieces I’ve picked up over the years.
Onward. Having gone through some of the basic Arduino tutorials, I’ve set my sights on what seems to me a fairly ambitious project. I picked up one of Spakfun’s pan and tilt brackets, got the facial reco tutorial working more or less and no want to go wireless so that I can basically mount a few camera’s around my property to keep an eye on things for me and make it possible for me to focus on refining my OpenCV code to to help the camera’s do a better job of focusing on looking for humans and not deer, stray dogs, racoons, etc.
I’ve done a fair bit of browsing and forum reading and it looks like most wireless work is currently focused on small RF Transceiver modules that have a fairly limited range. The front of my driveway is about a quarter mile from my home. Ideally, I’d like to be able to breadboard together an RF transceiver or transmitter and receiver separately from discrete components of sufficient power to reasonably transmit and receive data out to one mile (so that I can use the same method to control the cameras, transmit and receive video info, and handle gate open/close functionality, etc). I figure if I can put together the hardware that transmits and receives reliably enough, I can then shift the problem more into the software domain where I feel much more confident.
I have found several sites that have all manner of schematics and plans for various built up transceivers, transmitters, receivers, etc but honestly, I’m not sure about some of the more fundamental topics to be able to confidently select one over another. ie, is there an FM or AM hetero-dyne frequency that is better suited to transmitting data at this distance? I haven’t been able to find a project site or forum post that would indicate anyone else had tried this, but I’m sure someone somewhere must have. To be sure, there are commercial units I could buy that would likely do the trick, but I wouldn’t learn near as much and I’d like to be able to tackle this from start to finish without resorting to one of those packages. AS I understand it, there are frequencies I can stick to that keep me out of harms way in terms of FCC interference and such, too I live in the middle of cascades and I’m reasonably sure that if I keep my transmission strength down to just what I need to hit the half mile/mile mark I’m very unlikely to bother anyone, regardless.
In any case, it’d be great to read what some of you folks have to suggest, perhaps a different forum specifically about this sort of thing, any gotchas I should be looking for, etc. Has anyone ever tried to create a built of transceiver pair for transmitting this kind of data volume with? Video ends up being quite a bit of data, even compressed. Looking forward to reading you folk’s thoughts on the matter,
John West