[Kevin Hester] pointed us to a way to make a WiFi webcam for under $10. This uses one of the many cheap ESP32 dev boards available, along with the Internet of Things platform PlatformIO and a bit ...
On the server side of things, the ESP32 and its attached camera are set up with MQTT ... or omitting it entirely in favor of Ethernet. As far as getting a lot out of a tiny microcontroller ...