I'm interested in expanding on the MotionMote and add a camera, but I do not know how a picture could be sent from the MotionMote to the Gateway. While adding a camera (http://www.adafruit.com/products/397) to the MotionMote should be trivial, how could the image be sent across to the Gateway?
The closest example online uses a Wifi shield, but I'd love to continue to use Moteino's where possible. One less thing to support: http://www.openhomeautomation.net/wireless-camera/ Maybe it's not possible, but figured I'd ask in this forum.
It might be possible, but it would require a quite a few 61 byte packets to transfer even a small JPEG image. Say your JPEG is 50 kBytes, that means 840 packets and for a valid JPEG you can't miss any, so it would take quite a while especially if have retries due to noise or interference. Also, how much RAM space do you have to buffer the image as it is sent? Unless the data coming in from the camera can be paused with XON/XOFF flow control or the like, it might not be possible at all. The Moteino CPU and radio is not really designed for the kind of bandwidth you need to transfer images, I would say that wifi (or just a wired connection) is more suitable.
A Raspberry Pi model A is $25 and the R-Pi camera (5 Mpixels!) is another $25, throw in a $10 USB-Wifi stick and you have a very capable wireless camera system. That Adafruit serial camera you linked to is $40 and its VGA image quality is nowhere near comparable.
Ok. That was my fear, but definitely understandable. I do have those pieces already, so I will give it a try. Thanks for your input.
It's the right decision- if you ever managed to get that serial camera running with a moteino it would be a huge effort and for relatively little benefit, in my opinion; the Pi is just the right tool for that job. I have several R-Pi camera setups and they have been working well for some months. Note, a Model A + camera bundle is only $40: http://www.alliedelec.com/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?SKU=70315057 ) Plus, there is a lot of support on the Pi for many kinds of things you might want to do with the camera.