Cumulus Support

I've overcooked this one on the search engines and left myself more confused than ever!

On my home page www.westonweather.co.uk I have a "Forecast" Icon, which is 120mm * 120mm. I want to change this to "weather cam" with a thumbnail of the same size, clickable to a large image.

I can cope with the coding of the page etc, and am OK with servers & FTPing (Site is run on a home server already), but what I can't get my head around is what equipment & software I need?!

The weather station server is located in a log cabin in the garden, which is where I'd also put a camera, pointing South (ish). So that leaves me with the choice of plugging a camera in to the USB port on the weather station server and running software (it's running XP at the moment) on that - or, I also have Gigabit LAN out there, so no issues plugging an IP camera in to the LAN.

So, what camera? What Software?

I set mine up quite some time ago so I assume there's be better hardware and software available now, but I use a Microsoft True 720p HD Lifecam Cinema. The weatherproof housing is a CCD Professional Aluminium external/internal camera housing, part nuber QC3330 from Jaycar Electronics (cut & paste from my website ).

I also use YAWCAM webcam software and have had no issues with it, but a lot of people have reported reliability issues and I haven't seen much development of this product. There are a few more options available now days which I'm sure you're about to hear about.

I decided on a cheap camera just to try this out and see if it's even worthwhile / popular. Picked up a cheap Chinese "Fozcam" copy for £30 which should arrive in the next couple of days.

Going to just have it FTP an image into a directory every 15 seconds or so.

In the mean time I have finished changing the code on my "weather by you Blues" template and have added a webcam box to the front page, like so: http://www.westonweather.co.uk/

The box is clickable, taking you to a webcam page, then that page is clickable should you want the full screen, full res file of the image.

It seems to work well (excepting I don't yet have a cam) without interfering with the design of the site.

interest to know how the cheap cam goes, is it a outdoor IP wireless one????

ace2 wrote:interest to know how the cheap cam goes, is it a outdoor IP wireless one????

It is, yes. If it's any good I'll provide a link to the eBay auction, if it's not I'll spare you all suffering the same pain.

I'm not relying on the wifi as it's some 50M or so away from the hub, but have spare LAN ports adjacent to where the camera will likely be fitted.

Well it works! For £33.99 shipped it's perfectly adequate for what I'm trying to do.

After lots of hair pulling trying to make the FTP work in a useable fashion (i.e rewriting same file name - the camera will not do this!), I decided to take a different approach and with the aid of Google found you can link directly to either a stream or a static image. I have done the later, setting the camera's own web server up on port 81.

The end result is that the weather cam uses NO additional bandwidth until either my home page or webcam page are requested - i.e no FTPing required.

Home page here: http://www.westonweather.co.uk (Right now it's dark so you won't see much other than some security lights!)

The eBay item number is: 360706028663 for anyone else interested.

edit - this is where I found the info about direct linking to images on the camera: http://www.ispyconnect.com/man.aspx?n=StarCam

westonweather wrote:
Home page here: http://www.westonweather.co.uk

there seems to be an alien life form attacking your camera!!!!

LOL. That's called "Rain", it may be Alien to you guys, but it certainly isn't to us

yeah haven't seen that in a while!!

44.9c(112.8f) today!!!!

Wow! Worlds apart as the saying goes!

I've been tweaking again!

The camera has been moved to a position facing SSE, with a good view of the sky & where it is both under shelter from the rain and not facing the security lights (Didn't think that through yesterday!).

My home page has a snapshot image ( http://www.westonweather.co.uk ) and when you click it, it should go to a streaming (albeit not smoothly!) image.

Would be interesting to hear how it works away from here. I have the advantage of being on the same LAN as the camera...

westonweather wrote:
Would be interesting to hear how it works away from here. I have the advantage of being on the same LAN as the camera...

Works just fine from here (southern Tasmania). Looks a bit grey and bleary though, the weather I mean, not the camera image

tumutbound wrote:

westonweather wrote:
Would be interesting to hear how it works away from here. I have the advantage of being on the same LAN as the camera...

Works just fine from here (southern Tasmania). Looks a bit grey and bleary though, the weather I mean, not the camera image

That's great to hear, thank you.

It's been grey & bleary since the beginning of December! Record rain & floods and a constant onslaught of Atlantic winds. Still, it's these things that keep us interested

westonweather wrote:Would be interesting to hear how it works away from here. I have the advantage of being on the same LAN as the camera...

I agree, looks good, but.....................


could you send those clouds my way????

Well in theory, if the earth really is round, if they keep blowing in from the coast they'll reach you eventually.

I've just seen that the eBay seller has put these up from £33.99 to £39.99 now. Looks like I got in just in time!