Unfortunately, you won't be able to use another camera unless it has it's own wireless interface to USB like the old EZ-Robot camera did. Security cameras usually have an analog [composite] signal out and the EZ-Robot has a digital protocol which is much different.

That being said, there's nothing stopping you from adding an array of Infrared LEDs around the EZ-Robot camera to create your own night vision effect.

A CCTV camera with composite video output can be used with ARC, I discussed how to do in this thread.

synthiam.com/Community/Questions/3809

I used a video sender for the wireless connection.

Hmm interesting I never thought of using a composite (RCA) video capture device to USB, then using a wireless RCA transmitter and receiver pair to send the video. Smart! I can't see this solution being all that affordable but it certainly would work if you really needed a security camera for your application. Thanks for bringing that up @Toymaker.

Hi Skater_10, My setup referred to in that thread cost around £100, which is just over twice the cost of the Konig camera, but the difference in performance for camera video applications is huge, all ARC video functions work so much better and the CCTV camera I used works down to almost near darkness without an IR LED array.

Tony

Sweet, that's impressive! I would love to see it one day. And thanks for the cost info by the way I was quite curious about it.

So Tony, Do you think your recommendation on this camera setup will improve tracking over the old camera that EZ Robot offered? I'm not worried about how it looks to me on a screen but how ARC responds and tracks movement and sends commands to my H-Bridges to move my DC motors.

Dave, it makes a great difference, its like speech recognition if you use a really good input device (mic) then you get much better SR accuracy, a cheap mic will generally give poor performance. Same with cameras, the Konig camera supplied with ARC is a low cost camera and is fine for experimenting with, but if you need repeatable (not dependent on light levels) performance then the camera needs to be upgraded. Also I have a lot of problems here with the 2.4GHz wireless link and very often get picture breakdown even in close proximity to the laptop. I use a hacked 5.8GHz wireless video link, which seems to have no interference at all.

Tony