Cumulus Support

hills wrote:Hey Geoff, the webcam looks great. I just had a look at 2:35am your time and it looks as if there's some light coming from over the horizon. Is that the morning sun or is there a township or city over there?

Just noticed your comment, Phil.....The camera is pointed south and there is the county town of Haverfordwest about six miles away, but I suspect the glow you saw was the milking shed for a nearby farm. The cloud base was very low and there was mist in the air.

Thanks for the link tip!

Gina wrote:Yes, I have the polariser screwed into an appropriate sized hole in the end of the box - now mounted outside. The sun's come out now after a dreary overcast day and lighting the trees and grass nicely. .

The filter has certainly improved the sky........

Any chance of some photos of the camera enclosure?

Gina...

Gina wrote:...and reduced the capture period to 2 mins. Increased compression too, so the image files will be smaller. I'm saving the files locally and been playing them back as a slide show. 5 mins between shots seemed too long.

My WebCam has been in operation for about 2 years now.

I have been using ImageSalsa (shareware) to retrieve one image every minute from the camera - the picture retrieval starts 30 minutes before sunrise and stops 30 minutes after sunset.

Those captured images are saved locally on the hard drive of the computer running ImageSalsa. The image is also watermarked with the updated weather data and the uploaded every minutes to my Internet server, again, by ImageSalsa.

Once a day, MovieSalsa (shareware) takes all those pictures (the number of saved daily pictures varies from 500 during the winter months to more than 900 during the summer months) and produces 2 types of movies, one Flash (swf) movie and one DivX movie. Once the movies are produced, they are uploaded to my Internet server.

I keep 8 movies on my Internet server, 7 Flash movies of the past 7 days (yesterday and the 6 previous days) and 1 DivX movie of the past day (yesterday).

The Flash movies are the largest in size, averaging 30M (each) in size whereas the DivX movies averages less than 15M in size - same number of pictures, same movie, same resolution, just better compression under DivX.

So, where was I going with all that... ...If you can afford the hard drive space, I recommend one image every minutes to create 'smoother' and interesting image motion.

geoffw wrote:Any chance of some photos of the camera enclosure?

I meant to take some photos as I was doing it but completely forgot Here are some I've just taken with it mounted on a temporary bracket on the outside of the lounge window. I might take it down tomorrow and take some photos of the box and contents. Bit of camera shake I'm afraid - I was standing on steps.Some protection from rain is provided by the overhang of the roof.

No need to dismantle it for me Gina. Thanks for the photos, a tidy little enclosure.

I see it is under the eaves of your bungalow (is it a Woolaway Bungalow?). You might want to consider a lens hood or a canopy shade when you put it out in the open. that filter might catch the sun.

geoffw wrote:No need to dismantle it for me Gina. Thanks for the photos, a tidy little enclosure.

I see it is under the eaves of your bungalow (is it a Woolaway Bungalow?). You might want to consider a lens hood or a canopy shade when you put it out in the open. that filter might catch the sun.

Yes, it is a Woolaway Bungalow. I will be keeping the camera in approximately the same location, under the eaves, but with a better bracket - what I'm using is very thin and the camera will move in a strong wind. So I shall be taking it down sometime and will then have an opportunity to take more photos.

I bought the enclosure for another purpose, for which it turned out a bit too small. It came from Maplins, here's the info :-
ABS Box MB1, code LH20W, http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?moduleno=1676

Ours is a Woolaway as well!

Yes, I remember you saying so

hills wrote:Yawcam has the feature where it will automatically put a saved picture up when the scheduler is turned off. You could just make that a saved image taken during the day. I had some problems when I had that set up, but I'm not sure what that problem was now. I think it kept saying no camera was selected the next morning. I haven't used it since.

I now have the results of my test run. All seems well. I set up the scheduler for both FTP and file to operate from 0400 to 2200 and for FTP to use the default Offline image. I watched the FTP change from webcam to offline image at 2200 and it was working with the live webcam image this morning (I didn't get up to check exactly when it came back on ). I have now checked the saved images on the local PC and they stopped at 2200 and resumed at 0400 this morning as scheduled. Next thing is to make up a personalised offline image.

The only problem is if YAWCAM or your PC or your 'line' goes kaput !

A simple PHP solution is:
This is used in your html / javascript page instead of the image file.
So if the code above was named mycam.php, then the (simplified) html 'call' would be:

Thank you for that

I've remounted my webcam using a more substantial bracket. While I had the box open I took some photos.