ClateCam (to be ArchCam)
I’m working on a project with Clate to set up a webcam aimed at the arch in downtown Athens which people can use to take their picture in front of the arch by calling in to a phone number. The Camera is currently sitting in Clate’s office however so anything I do with it until it is actually mounted downtown I will call “ClateCam”.
My first steps were to figure out how to remotely capture an image from the camera and to throw that image up on a web site (the future plan is that people will be able to log into a site with their phone number and see their pictures).
I have succeeded in these first steps using a shell script on on linux computer (could also run on a mac with the proper utilities installed) that grabs an image from the camera using wget. After it retrieves the image it has to flip it horizontally and vertically because the camera is set up to be hung upside down (probably can be changed in the camera settings) and resize the image into a few different sizes for different applications. Once all that is done, it deletes the original and puts the others into a folder that can be remotely accessed. It all sounds really complicated, but I promise it’s not too bad.
The script is running every minute in a cron script on my server right now and the image can be seen, well why not here:
!http://nmi.roundhere.net/images/nmicammed.jpg!
I’ve gone a step further and made a little page you can view on your cellphone that you can access at:
http://www.nmi.uga.edu/students/cmartin/cell/nmicam.html
I tried to make the cell phone page a wml page, but wml has issues in displaying any type of decent image so html it is.
