Farm owners, in their everyday work, would wish to visualize the actual situation of their farm they are managing thousands of miles away. Agronomists and fruiters would also need to observe the crop progress so as to check the expectations from the weather data. One way to do all that without actually being there is through the computer and internet.

Hence, our goal is to place cameras on different remote weather stations, which are located around the farm. Due to limited power supply, our camera has to be able to switch on and off automatically and periodically and this can be set very easily even after installation. It can also be moved to focus on different parts of the field. After taking a picture, the camera will send the digitized picture back to the base station, which is meters away from the remote station, through a wireless channel. For the camera, a micro controller is used to fulfill all the functionalities that a camera is supposed to have in our project. The image sensor used in the camera is a CMOS sensor. Compared with CCD sensor, a CMOS sensor significantly simplifies our circuit design. As for the wireless link between the camera and the server (computer), a transceiver would be used. There will be a transmitter at the camera sending data through a radio frequency link. There will also be a receiver at the server (computer) in the base station. The receiver stores all the data from different cameras and passes them to the server (computer).Since the server is connected to the Internet, all picture are accessible from different places around the world.

There are many security cameras and web cameras available in the market. However, a camera with those functionalities described above has some potential of being used in many other areas .

Shan Wang, Minjie Xie, Carol Wong,
Professor Rod Tucker, Associate Professor Graeme Pendock