Wednesday 29 May 2013

Web cam

Just trying something out here, I bought a couple of IP cams cheaply on ebay but one of them had an intermittent problem in that when the overnight IR lights were on it would conk out after an hour - not sure if it overheated or what.

While in theory I could have returned it, since it was basically working I ended up investigating the internals and then after a bit of thinking time I de-activated the IR lights by bypassing the light level sensor (by soldering a link across the terminals).

So now it should run OK but will be dark image overnight.

http://postimg.org/gallery/c6nqcbji/



This means it can be used through glass without reflection issues so I'm considering using it as a weather webcam.

The image quality is not that good though, and to avoid overloading the ftp connection I'm just uploading a jpg image every 5 minutes rather than proper streaming.

I'll probably use a different view to this if things run OK for a few days.

Here's the trial page and latest uploaded image below
http://weather.westerdale.info/cam/


updates every 5 minutes