ebarker correctly describes the functionality of the CMUcam we received in the KOP some years ago, but that does not apply here--the CompactRIO should (from what I understand) take anything you throw at it.
I know Linksys makes some remote surveillance products but I think they demand a high premium. After some searching on NewEgg (no affiliation, just..they do great work
) the
list shows that the cheapest Ethernet camera is $79.99. As far as transferring images, I think you will need to do a bit of reverse engineering. Can you do HTTP with LabVIEW? I am not familiar with it at all, so I don't know how possible this is. If the web interface is a simple webpage refreshing itself, you could possibly hotlink to that JPEG and keep downloading it every second or so. But if it's anything more sophisticated...you are welcome to ask here, but I can't guarantee that we can help.
Good luck, and I wish I were in your shoes. Instead I'm a college freshman...got to focus on class, not FIRST, at least for a few terms...
May the force be with you!
JBot
Some more thoughts: don't bother buying the camera until you have set up (on your PC) a copy of
WAMP or
something equivalent and placed a JPEG in the WWW folder and successfully parsed and processed it with LabVIEW on the CRIO. Then you can figure out the interface if it isn't a series of JPEG images.
You have a lot of work to do...but I still envy you!