OT: webcam

You could go wireless using basic video equiptment, then get more hitech at the computer end. Cheap colour video camera would cost you £30/40 from one of the many internet retailers or maybe Maplins, otherwisde rig up a camcorder. A 2.4GHz video sender would cost £30 from Lidl, Maplin etc. Stick them together and wiggle it round till you get the best picture. Sometimes it works perfectly over long distances, sometimes you need to have someone moving the sender or reciever while you watch the picture.

At the PC end all you would need would be a cheap TV capture card from PC world, they are only £20/30. Put the phono video signal from the reciever into the capture card and take captures. The updating depends on whether you are hosting the website from your PC or somewhere else. If it is your PC then you could have the capture software save an image using the same filename everyhour and link to that on your page. Would be more tricky if it needed to ftp it to your server as well, I'm not sure how you would do that bit.

I like these kind of projects, good luck. DavidM

You can go wireless for less than that.

Have a look at

Regards

Liam

Have someone write a perl script to upload the file to the server, use windows task scheduler (win2k & above) or cron if on Linux to run the script whenever necessary.

Something like this should do;

#!/usr/bin/perl print "Transfering file to ftp server........"; open(FTP,">.ftp.txt"); print FTP "open

Twas Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:39:49 GMT when terry put finger to keyboard producing:

Thanks for that, I'm running win2kpro here so that should be fine.

Thanks everyone for the info, I'm now saving the cash to get a camera set up. the land rover still needs stuff though :o(

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

Wireless is cheeeep these days...

I'm playing with a few cheap IP cams from aria.co.uk Steve???

Dunno if this'll work, but try pointing your browser at:

login if asked as: 1 password blank.

I've set the camera in very low resolution.

Twas Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:25:10 +0100 when Mother put finger to keyboard producing:

can't make it work.. and how cheap is cheap?

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

What are you using to look at it with ?

Cheap is around 70 quid all in.

Steve

Twas Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:58:02 +0100 when Steve Taylor put finger to keyboard producing:

IE6

is that £70 for a wireless camera and associated stuff to put an image on a website?

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

Shouldn't be a problem, shitty as it is, IE is the preferred browser for this device (make ya wanna puke dunnit...)

No, no, no... listen very carefully...

The camera has a built in mini-webserver. It IS therefore, as you put it 'the website'.

You give the camera an IP address - it knows about dyndns - so even you* could give it a web address accessible from anywhere in the world via a web browser...

(*not intended to sound partonising, I mean 'even you - with a variable ISP IP address). Ask Phil or David about dyndns

By the way, Steve, can you work out how big the EPROM is?

I'm tempted to try a linux blow on it with a very cut down apache install...

As my learned colleague says,

AND the camera will auto-magically FTP images to your official server, every X seconds, or when it detects motion in the image, whereupon, it will ALSO send you an email, and acopy of the picture. ( careful with this option- it put 300 messages in my email that way.)

No, but I can do.

How will you know what to do ? The hardware is hardly open.Do you want our list of deduced CGI commands ?

Steve

On or around Tue, 13 Jul 2004 11:25:10 +0100, Mother enlightened us thusly:

not a lot of picture happening. blank frame, broken image doofrit, and a certain amount of net activity. how big are the pictures, filewise?

It pulls an active X from the camera, a firewall might block the transfer.

Steve

That might explain the several hits for this particular ip (72 thru 78 IIRC). I have a router and software firewall any way I can safely view it?

AJH

Twas Fri, 09 Jul 2004 12:42:45 +0100 when Mr.Nice. put finger to keyboard producing:

newsflash...

I have an old nasty digital camera that works as a webcam when plugged in...

how long a usb cable can I use?

Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.)

IIRC the active cables max out at about 5 metres but you can string up to 5 of them together, so max looks like 25 metres (but the cost of 5 active cables and joiners is likely to be a bit high).