lightning caught on YAWCAM motion detector

[hills]

I caught a few shots of a lightning storm that went though last night around 4:00am with the motion detection facility of yawcam and my webcam:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~storerfa ... otion.html

Unfortunatley I'm still to catch the illusive cloud to ground strike, I suspect these are all intercloud.

[nking]

They're really good pictures considering it's a webcam and the conditions. It's quite amazing what can be achieved with YAWCAM

[serowe]

I have 3 security cams around my house - none posted on the web btw. I *used* to have the software generate emails when specific areas on each camera caught motion during certain hours or if we were away from the house.

That is until the cobwebs, spiders and even birds started setting the detectors off!

The final straw I think was one summer night about 18 months ago when Melbourne got one helluva storm around midnight -2am - and I ended up with around 100 emails, complete with images from EACH camera as the lightning lit the palce up!

I wish I had kept the video files now, but sadly...

(Another thing these are good for is when postal delivery vans or couriers say they tried to deliver a letter or package and the video clearly shows them driving to the front of the driveway, getting out, putting the 'Failed to deliver - come and collect card' straight into the letterbox and then driving off! I believe the last guy that did this was fired on the spot!)

[hills]

Yeah, I have a second camera set up looking over the front door for exactly that purpose, but I only get the images uploaded to a secure web site, no emails. The weather cam on my roof only goes into motion detection mode overnight specifically to try and capture lightning strikes.

[serowe]

Mine has the opposite use - they are proper camera's ie sound and vision feeds - and the hardware and software I am using don;t allow for images to be extracted to be palced on the web But the software does allow me to designate zones in the image to be used for motion detection and also the times when that detection will be active.

I can do this on individual camera's so, at times, it has come in handy.

The only real hassle is that I can;t get the hardware/software to work on a Windows Server (which I use at home for a numbr of things)...