Leaving pets at home alone can be stressful for pet owners. But in-home pet cameras solve this problem. No wonder there are so many of them on the market. To build one, you need both software and hardware development teams.
A startup that was looking to develop a pet monitoring camera had a software development team in-house ready to implement the solution for pet owners. But they needed a strong hardware development partner to be able to handle the low-level requirements. They found Integra Sources.
We provided PCB design and developed a custom embedded Linux distribution build for the device installed at home for pet monitoring. We also developed a camera module that enables real-time video streaming via a mobile application.
Embedded hardware development. We provided a circuit design for the pet monitoring device based on the Allwinner A20 microprocessor.
Kernel and driver development. We developed custom Linux distro and configured the system to reduce the boot time to less than five seconds.
Embedded software development for the camera module. We developed a video streaming service that enables 1080p at 30fps H.264 video stream. This server receives frames from the camera module, which is based on the OmniVision OV5640 image sensor. The camera is attached to a board, which encodes the information using H264 hardware codec, then streams videos over RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) via Wi-Fi.
In addition, we built an app for Android to test video streaming through network address translation (NAT). We configured NAT to allow a router to act as an agent between the public network and a private network, thus reducing the usage of IP addresses.
The final device is an IP camera similar to PetCube with real-time video and a built-in laser pointer. The main purpose of the camera is to watch if a pet is playing nicely while the owner is away. The pet owners can watch, talk to, and play with their pets using a mobile app.
Boot time
< 5 seconds
Video quality
1080p at 30fps H.264
Make some noise
Make some noise
The virtual camera is similar to ManyCam. It allows people to use their webcams on various applications whilst simultaneously live streaming or using video chat
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The project consisted of hardware development for three PCBs, custom Linux image development, and driver development for different modules of the smart home system
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