I'm trying to design a camera system for use in my bike shed. The bikeshed is in range of wifi but has no power.
First I thought I could use a Raspberry Pi with a Picam, and have video streamed to an endpoint I have set up in Azure.
I quickly realised it consumes a lot of power and after less than a day the battery would be empty.
A few things to note:
- I could maybe change the microcontroller, but from what I've heard the Arduino isn't powerful enough to record and stream video.
- I can't use solar power or wind power as I don't have access to the roof and I feel this would give away the camera too.
- I have no power sockets available so I'm relying on a power pack. Ideally, I don't want to be charging it more than once a week.
- I considered using an Arduino to "wake" the raspberry pi. But with a boot time of around 20 seconds, it could miss crucial footage.
Using a raspberry pi seems like overkill to me. But as mentioned my lower power microcontrollers don't seem to be powerful enough to operate the camera.