Car Cam

[timfoster]

I'm new to the pi and want to try building a camera system for my car. Some advice would be greatly appreciated.

The basic principle is that I have 6-8 cameras setup in and around the car feeding video/audio to a USB hard drive attached to the pi.

I am buying a very small (1cm x 1cm) camera from china to test the theory. The camera has RCA outputs and I think I can find convertor cables (RCA to USB?) to feed the video/audio in to the pi. What I want though is multiple cameras. Is there an expansion board that will take up to 8 RCA feeds directly?

My background is definitely not linux and so I may be asking really dumb questions on this. I read that I need to buy a licence to decode video on the pi. Is this the case if all I'm doing is feeding to a storage device?

The other question, although probably for later in the project, is to be able to power the entire set from the car. I presume this is the easy bit though?

Any help or advice would be great.

[SN]

8 feeds will probably drown the pi - can you not get (don't know the name) boxes which will take 8 feeds and put them onto a single (gridded 4x2 or 3x3) feed - then you have a fighting chance because
after that it becomes a process of streaming in the single feed - you'll need another 'box' to get from RCA to USB from which you can stream in and save out to the disk

[timfoster]

Thanks for the reply Steve. Is there a better way to get the inputs in then rather than rca to usb? I can buy a full scale DVR which takes multiple RCA inputs, so I'm assuming they are available. I've tried googling a few things to no avail (unless I want a minimum order of 10k bespoke cables). Any suggestions?

[RaTTuS]

why so many inputs - ...
multiple Rpi's may be the way to go really ...

[timfoster]

Erm. Dunno. Just the way I thought it would have to work. What's an rpi? As you can tell, I'm not exactly knowledgeable about these things. Keen to learn though. Am I looking in the right direction with http://elinux.org/RPi_Tutorial_Easy_GPI ... 6_Software?

[jamesh]

Hmm, my thoughts were multiple Raspi's as well - although I'd wait for the camera module to be release as that 1080p30 quality, rather than webcams. Perhaps 7 Pi's altogehterh, 6 camera equipped, once to coordinate. or maybe you would have one master that also has a camera.

Trouble is would then get a bit expensive that all those cameras.

[SN]

Trouble is would then get a bit expensive that all those cameras.

Aha! Something you want to tell us about re: likely camera module pricing James?

[commander_data]

The Pi just about manages 2 USB webcams at low res - one USB and one IP cam works well (or two IP cams of course).