Hacking Wireless Commands onto an IP Camera

Zoot

What's very clever about this 'bot is not so much the 'bot itself, but how he used some obscure CGI (internet) commands built in to the IP camera to send serial info out of the camera's JTAG port. He hooked the port up to his 'bot; this lets him send movement commands and such to the 'bot using the same TCP/IP connection and CGI (web page) front-end that the camera uses.

http://letsmakerobots.com/node/22674

Martin_H

That's interesting. I've been doing more projects involving wireless and a wireless camera might be a good fit. My thinking is that microcontrollers based robots are cheap and low power, but lack the CPU and memory for complex algorithms. When you scale up the CPU you need bigger batteries, and then a bigger bot. The costs seem to rise rapidly as well as the room the robot needs.

So wireless relaying of sensor data to a remote CPU allows you to stay small, but think big. I suppose a purist would think of it as a cheat because the wireless link is a virtual tether compared with brains on board. Certainly you become limited to the range of the wireless link.