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I am a second year Electrical Engineering major. I have done a little with the Arduino, but it is not powerful enough to handle video (from what I understand). I would like to capture video from something like a webcam and send it over Bluetooth to either a computer or phone/tablet. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to approach this? I have not found a PCB with a microprocessor powerful enough to handle this that includes Bluetooth. Will I have to make the circuit on my own? I have not designed circuits yet, so I would have no idea on how to design the circuit and handle the transmitter. Any suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Brent
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    This is usually done with wifi, such cameras can be purchased off the shelf. – Chris Stratton Sep 01 '12 at 05:02
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    I don't think Bluetooth is fast enough for video if you need more quality. – Renan Sep 01 '12 at 05:09
  • You can interface to a wifi module like [this one](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822) which would be fast enough to support video streaming; also, you will likely need a heavier processor than the Atmega328 on an Arduino. – boardbite Sep 01 '12 at 05:57
  • @boardbite the host data rate of that wifi module is only 464Kbps. 8bit colour video would have to be tiny. Grayscale video is more feasible. But we're not even considering the protocol overhead of using the UART interface of the module. – tuxfool Sep 05 '12 at 12:44

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Although most people don't believe that bluetooth carries video, in fact video is specified in the Bluetooth spec as the VDP (Video Distribution Profile). You will have to find a module that supports it, such as the following one:

KCWirefree Module

You haven't specified the frame rate for your application, but I believe that bluetooth will be relatively limited in this sense due to the high throughput required.

Despite all this, VDP is rarely supported and can lead to many issues in getting your application running. Your best bet is to use WiFi for this application since it's widely usable and will be much more practical for basically any application. WiFi can support streaming data very well (depending on a lot of parameters such as range, throughput, processing power available, etc).

Gustavo Litovsky
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