We spent last weekend and early this week to installing the camera. We still have to tiddy up the CAT5 cable on the outside of the house, but its running. The second half of the week was spent working on delivery and image overlay (adding words over image). Those were 2 very tough problems.

FTP upload is a sore topic around the CRW offices. Our webhost limits the number of connections from our external IP address to 2. They have a package to expand this to unlimited, but it adds an extra $36 per month, and we need to become Linux server admins.

We are using the camera’s built in webserver, and allowing our webserver to connect via http directly and “pull” the image instead of pushing via FTP. The process avoids the FTP upload limits. So the image now is on the webserver, can we see it. We ran 24 hours without image overlays, but our goal is to include weather data directly on the webimage.

We tested ImageSalsa last week. Its a clunky, very complicated piece of software. The software does require a license purchased from Ambient Weather. The way things are going with VWS, we feel uncomfertable investing in that company any longer. ImageSalsa was uninstalled from our servers. Now what?

We have started working more and more with PHP, and figured there had to be something available which could replace ImageSalsa. Image overlaying is a process where you lay text directly over a base image, and create a new resultant image that includes your text. You can also use this to mask the source image, which we are.

Mike, from Long Beach, WA Weather, provided us with an awsome script to do all of that and more. We are currently using his script to transfer base image, resize, overlay text, and a partrige in a pear tree. One script that does it all. We then process our webcam image a second time through a simular script that creates the thumbnail image in the left navigation bar. Pretty slick.

I will update the “our equipment” page to include these two technologies that make our webcam come to life. We have plans to expand the information included on the text overlay. We are also working on scripts that will refresh the webcam image automagically, without refreshing the whole page. Down the road we will be looking for a way to stream video from our camera and provide time laps videos as well.

For now we’re up and running. Off to the next weather related project.