I’ve just had a very frustrating experience trying to find a webcam. Unfortunately, the meaning of that word has changed, and there doesn’t appear to be a search term for what I want. Can anyone make a recommendation for me?
Here’s what I’m after:
An inexpensive static camera that will sit in a fixed location aimed out of a window. It is too far from my computer to connect with a cable, so USB/Firewire won’t help me. I want it to take a picture every X seconds and use a WiFi connection to ftp it to my Web server.
I do NOT need video.
I do NOT need high resolution (640x480 will be great)
I do NOT need rugged outdoor housing (it will be inside the window)
Ideally, I’d set the thing up once with the WiFi password and the ftp information, plug it into 220V power, and forget about it. It would be extra awesome if I could connect to it via a secure Web site and change configuration information, because the place I’m putting it isn’t easy to get at.
Since I got no responses, I’m beginning to think that what I’m looking for doesn’t exist. Do I need to get a small computer to put with the webcam so that I can connect it using USB cables and software on the computer? Or do I need to buy one of the expensive all-weather rugged outdoor units?
I not only don’t have an answer, but I actually have the same question. I want a camera more or less as you describe it (although video on motion sensor would also work) to be setup up inside my house but about 30 feet away from the PC. Data just dumped into my PC would be more than fine, no need to upload anywhere, I just want to catch a couple of nuisances.
Oops - typo. Whose idea was it to put the “1” and “2” keys so darned close together?
Gosh. Never would have thought of that. :rolleyes:
I searched for “wifi webcam”, “wireless webcam”, “inexpensive webcam”, “indoor webcam”, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I’ve found Amazon products that are unavailable, video cameras, outdoor heavy-duty cameras, cameras costing hundreds of dollars, and a whole bunch of other stuff that’s useless to me. I’m continuing to slog through it, but I was hoping there might be a Doper who has set one of these up recently that might offer a recommendation.
Looking back at what I just wrote, it came out snarkier than I intended. My apologies, Duckster. I’m just frustrated reading poorly-written online specs and finding products with the same name but drastically different capabilities. I don’t want to plunk down $100 only to find that I can’t ftp pics to my Web site with it. One of these Webcams, for example, looks good, it’s cheap, and it even streams video – but it only stores pics onboard. My internet connection can’t handle 10,000 hits a day on a 640x480 image file. My Web server can, and that’s why I want to send the pics there.
I’m just hoping to find someone who can chime in and say, “I used a Fubar 2000 to do what you’re trying to do and it worked great.”
Is there some way to automate your website (or something; I’m not a website designer) to go to the webcam every so often and copy that image to your website, and the rest of the internet would get it from there? Essentially, the webite would be responsible for initiating the transfer, instead of the webcam. Or would this not solve your problem?
Depending on how the webcam works, that (or something similar) is probably an option. It’d depend, though. For example, if the webcam’s only viewable through a custom Java applet that directly streams from the camera, getting the picture would be tricky. But if the camera runs an embedded web server that serves up a still frame as an image, then it’s not too difficult to pull the image from the camera and push it to the website.
