We’ve seen Arduino-powered Twitter machines, and even some that can send text messages, but how about one that’s a video phone? That’s what the people over at cooking Hacks put together with their very excellent 3G Arduino shield.
On board the shield is an internal GPS receiver, microphone, speaker, 3G module, and a cam sensor with VGA resolution. The 3G module is able to act as a 3G modem by means of a USB connection, allowing any computer to take advantage of wireless Internet with a SIM card.
While in their tutorial the people use a terminal running on their computer to send AT commands to place a call, it’s possible to simply put all that info in a sketch making for a small, battery-powered video link straight to your cell phone. seems like the best piece of hardware for a wireless, 3G-enabled video feed for a robot. You can check out the video from their tutorial after the break.