Pool Construction Cam Info

The Camera is a Veo Wireless Observer Netcam. It's configured for my home wireless network and doesn't need a computer to operate. Obviously (lots of glare), it's not designed for outdoor use and I remove it each night in case of condensation. It's attached to some siding under the eave outside the playroom. The eve should protect it from most weather, should we get any.

The Camera has both Audio and Pan/Tilt capabilities. For this application audio is not being used and Pan/Tilt is used to aim the camera after installation.

The Camera has the ability to send an email once a minute. This is normally triggered by an optional motion sensor, but in my case a paper clip tells the camera that the sensor is always triggered. A custom Perl script receives the email on Eric's Server, uses the PerlMagick library to clean up the image a bit, add a timestamp, save it as a unique filename, resize it, and finally store it as the current.jpg file.

I've started a Yahoo! Group to talk about this camera. While Veo makes a camera with unmatched price/features, their product quality and customer "service" is some of the worst I've seen in a consumer product. Personally, I've returned two cameras due to bad pan/tilt motors out of the box. I got my current camera via Ebay, so I could verify it worked before I bought it.

At the end of the day, I download the images using FileZilla, and use the FFMPEG package to convert the jpgs to a movie. I may automate the movie-making and have it run on the server too. These web pages were created with NVU.

Update: 03/11/05.

I noticed the picture is much better at dusk, so I added sun glasses (literally, with hot glue, so it could be easily removed) The picture is *MUCH* better.

Comments? I can be reached via email.