Automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) technologies are vital to many access control systems today. A designer of ALPR-based access control systems, Control Module, Inc seeked a low-cost replacement for their current system design. With their sponsorship, we have been charged with the design of camera hardware for this replacement system. We have designed a modular IP camera platform with support for many peripherals using common protocols. This is in order to provide a design with a long product life that does not need complete replacement upon the obsolescence or discontinuation of a vital component. At the heart of this design is a Linux-enabled system-on-module with hardware support for communication protocols. Using a digital video camera and an array of diagnostics sensors in conjunction with the built-in Ethernet hardware, the system-on-module is configured to combine all data inputs into one continuous data stream. This data stream is read by the computing platform running image processing algorithms to perform analysis for automatic license plate recognition and is then deposited on a safe data backup platform.