Some questions about the Kickstarter ALCAM-OEM camera

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In anticipation of the ALCAM camera, I have been contemplating a few ways to use it. But it also brought about a couple of questions like these below in my head :

  1. If I only want to use it to get images via the serial interface, would it still be necessary to have an SD card on the camera itself. (I know they SD card IO is exposed and you can connect an external SD card holder, but that is not what I’m after. I want to know if you can get away from using an SD card altogether.)

  2. I’m not sure if the camera board should be mounted in portrait or landscape mode, or does it not matter? (In other words the orientation can be defined by software)

  3. Anybody got any recommendations on how one can waterproof the camera for underwater usage to a depth of about 30 meters?

  4. I would like to add LEDS for lightning with the camera and be able to turn these LED’s on or off via remote serial command. Is there any camera command that will enable me to use the camera itself to turn on a digital IO pin?

  5. I seem to remember there was talk at some stage about adding motion detect capability into the camera firmware itself. Is this still one cards and will it already be on the camera shipped as part of the rewards?

  6. If new features for the camera evolve later on, would it be possible to easily upgrade the camera firmware without need extra development tools?

Looking forward to any feedback and more so to receive the camera itself.

Regards

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@ KiwiSaner -

  1. You can read images directly over the serial interface with no need for an SD card.
  2. We expose a command to set mirroring and flipping which can control the orientation.
  3. We do not currently expose control over any GPIOs.
  4. Motion detection is still something we will be investigating in the future.
  5. To update the firmware, you just need to set the board in bootloader mode by manipulating two pins and then using terminal software, upload the new firmware using XMODEM.
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Thank you very much John for the answers. All sounds very good. Looking forward to the camera.