Spy Cameras have became very popular in last few years, and they are available in many ‘forms’, like Pen Camera, Power Socket Camera, Glasses Hidden Camera etc. So here we are sharing one cool ‘form’ of spy Camera: Coffee Cup Spy Camera. This is not just a simple Spy cam, but it is intelligent too, it automatically Clicks Pictures when you tilt your Coffee cup to have a sip of Coffee.
This Coffee Cup Spy Cam, is using Arduino Uno, a Camera Module, Accelerometer, and a SD card shield. Operation is simple, when you tilt the coffee cup, to act like sipping the coffee, accelerometer senses the tilt and Arduino instructs Camera Module for taking pictures. It continuously takes pictures until the coffee cup is tilted and stops on keeping the coffee cup in normal upright position. Two LEDs are there for indication, one illuminates continuously in tilted position and other one blinks when some picture is taken. Pictures are being saved on SD card inside the SD card Shield.
They used TTL serial JPEG Camera Module, which should be properly focused before connecting to the Arduino. Its Focus can be set by using RCA connecter and a monitor. Also Seeed SD card shield should be properly formatted, following the instruction here, depending upon the Version no. Accelerometer used is Memsic 2125 2-axis accelerometer. Tilt threshold and other parameters can be set in Arduino Sketch.
The whole setup is installed in two Paper Coffee cups, with a Hole at the Bottom, for Camera lens. Instead of using a heavy Battery pack, a normal 9v battery is connected to the Arduino, by soldering a snap battery connector to Arduino.
You can further customize this Coffee Cup Spy Camera, to make it more cool and less detectable, like you can use smaller camera or can paint Black the bottom surface so that Camera can be invisible. You can also try to ‘Shrinkify’ the whole setup or modify the code to get more out of this.
