Concrete Cam

The webcam is a D-Link DCS-6620G wireless. The nice thing about the wireless is all I need to do is provide power. JPEG images are FTP'd periodically to my 3.2 GHz Pentium web server running Apache/Linux and then served to web surfers from there; so it is MUCH more scalable than everyone trying to pull data from my Comcast cable connection. In fact, the JPEG file sizes are about 40-50K, so even with their high-speed 768Kbit/second connection to the home, there's not a lotta extra bandwidth available sending 'em at one/second. Unfortunately, the camera won't FTP a video stream, and I'm limiting the auto-refresh rate to every 5 seconds - pls take it easy on my web server, OK? BTW, I have a second webcam (on a UPS no less) that is pointed on the concrete cam ... just in case anybody comes by - don't end up like this guy ;-)

I used Michael Still's quick-n-dirty approach to convert a bunch of JPEG's to an MPEG movie. Imagemagick is pretty slow ... so I only grabbed one frame per minute rather than all of them ... and the final result is just over 2 seconds of movie per hour of "real-time" - here's a couple of 'em for 'ya:

BTW, the actual JPEG's from the webcam have better image quality than what is depicted in the MPEG stream - this is because I compressed things down a bit to keep the file sizes reasonable. I.e. that 2.6 MByte MPEG of the pour itself balloons to 47 MBytes on the highest quality setting. For comparison purposes, here is the final frame of that video showing a lotta smiling faces now that we were done ... or maybe because I bought 'em all beer! ;-)

And check out the grasshoppers who also thought the webcam was cool.

Not pretty, but it works!

concrete cam

Alek needs to unload the dishwasher

Nice "cam box", eh?!?
webcam 1 webcam 2

My friend Jon says there are some JPEG artifacts
in the lower right of this snapshot ...
alek cam

My friend Shawn wondered if it was real
Good question - how DO I really "prove" that?
But would I put such a goofy picture of myself up? ;-)

hi shawn

All done today ... per August 24th Wall Street Journal

wsj

Alek heads back to the house as Kyle pokes his head out

done

Last image before I pulled the webcam power

done