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By hogwell
#201263
I've been looking into building an Arduino project to monitor my remote cabin over the Internet.

I'm envisioning a basic Arduino running a wifi (or ethernet) webserver and linking to my home computer via an AT&T cellular wifi router.
(I think AT&T will allow limited use of port 80 as a webserver)

There seems to be too many choices, none of them perfect.

My requirements:
1. Read two or three temperatures in the cabin, displayed on a web page accessed remotely from my home through the Internet.
2. Communication to my own (fixed IP) home-base webserver via port 80.
3. Allow sketch updates to be uploaded to the remote Arduino from my remote home-base.
4. Ultimately, I'd like to include a motion sensor and a camera to email a picture of any activity in the cabin. (this is a lot harder, I realize).
5. I'd like a direct link to my own server without using a "cloud IoT" subscription service.

This seems like something a lot of people would want and have probably already implemented, so I'm reaching out to the forum for advice.

1 and 2 seem pretty straightforward.
The remote Arduino could HTTP_REQUEST its current (assigned) Internet IP address periodically to my home base IP to let me know its address.
Then, my homebase could HTTP_REQUEST the data from the remote Arduino webserver.
3. (Sketch updates) This could be possible with the Arduino SDE library and an SD shield, but this seems to only be available to MKR 3.3V boards.
(Is that true?) Are there any other options for updating sketches over the Internet for, say, a standard UNO or Redboard?

4. This should be just some additional webserver software for communication, and hardware for the camera and motion sensor.

What Arduino would be most useful here? Which wifi board(s)? What about a camera that works with an Arduino?
There seem to be a lot of options and they all have pros and cons, of course...
most seem to require a cloud service of some kind.

Any suggestions? Thanks!
By jremington
#201265
+1 for the RPi, which has built in Ethernet/USB WiFi ports. A high quality, inexpensive camera module is also available.

Standard Arduinos can't handle images and are very limited in networking capability.
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By redwire
#201267
Consider what power you have in the remote cabin. Is this solar or battery powered? Or mains powered?
Arduino is not suited to do image processing, so a RPi would be recommended with the camera module.

You could simply use a door switch to have an Arduino send an intruder alert, as an alarm. This is what I do with ESP8266.
By hogwell
#201269
I think you're right - I'm looking more into using an RPi with Apache...
I have grid power at the cabin, so that's not an issue.
Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.