The project is a fully autonomous device which uses a cheap camera that is mounted on a pan/tilt neck assembly. It was named as Pictomatix MkII which can only take 25 high resolution pictures since it only has 64MB of non-upgradeable camera memory. A simple surveillance robot can be built at home using this cheap camera along with R/C servos and a PICAXE control board. a quick test to make sure that the PICAXE could control the camera is shown on the first video below while the second video is the first time out wherein some nice spinouts were achieved by making the wet concrete.

The image below shows the components inside the camera as it accounts to about ¼ of the weight of the Canon A580 power shot without the batteries. Only 25 640×480 uncompressed pictures can be taken by this camera and the pictures have to be downloaded via the USB cable before turning it OFF or the photos will be lost when the power is turned OFF. The chassis used by the robot is also shown in the next image.

In the image below, a 330V rated large capacitor located at the back is used to store a charge for the flash. It is advised not to touch this capacitor and the surrounding circuitry in order to avoid electric shock and the discharge which can damage the low voltage circuitry of the camera since it will discharge very slowly through time. For the device to discharge, it would be better to leave the camera without batteries and be tested with a multimeter before being touched.

The connections are shown in the below image wherein the battery holder directly provides the power connections. This camera contains only two buttons, the SHOOT and MODE. The buttons are operated by NPN transistors since each button was grounded on one side. The next image shows the 4-wire connection where Brown is Ground, Red is 4.4V, Yellow when shorted to Ground changes the mode and Orange when shorted to Ground takes a photo or changes options depending on the mode.

Shown in the image below is the Neck that is made with polymorph and the design of the bracket. A small heated blob in the microwave to join the servos together. This is enough to bond directly with the servos plastic casing and will be hard to separate the servos without being damaged. Some of the first photos taken by the this robot can be seen in the following images.