The webcam has now been fitted on it’s external pole, the system has been weather proofed and should be resisting to most of the Scottish weather.
Here are the final pictures of the rig:
Tag: arduino
Webcam System Gallery etc…
My Webcam system is finally finished, I have waterproofed the system and it is now located outside above the stable building, allowing a full 370o Pan and 190o Tilt!
Here is the Gallery pages showing snaps with 5 minutes intervals. This setup has been sourced from Mitch Fournier’s Blog and rewritten in Perl executed by a 5 minutes Cron.
The rig is entirely DIY made with wood, screws,13 switches, cables, 2 electric motors, 4 servos, an Arduino Uno connected to a PC via USB loaded with a Python script from principialabs.com, The camera controls can be manually overridden. The camera itself was bought on Ebay as “spare repair (the tape does not load)” connected to an Analog TV card, finally, the web streaming is handled by a piece of Software called Palantir. The whole hardware/software is Open Source. Any Camcorder can be used as the bracket is able to hold any moderately light camera hardware.
The Pan Tilt Kit is controllable via a web page via buttons (see flash animation above) and Ajax Dynamic Content. The web cam has two Zoom speeds and currently one speed Pan and Tilt, however it is capable of two speeds, still to write code to enable that.
The Kit
Here are a few shots of the kit. Bear in mind this is a DIY job with cheap hardware!
Here are two short Videos showing the rig in action:
Webcam
I am please to announce that the “custom” made webcam is functional! Took me a while but I now have a fully operational pan/tilt/zoom home made rig. For security reasons, the access to the cam is restricted. I am re-enforcing the wiring and changing the configuration to a more compact setup.
As promised. Once I have it all ready I’ll show it in action and how I did it.
I am sure that most people will say there are easier ways to do it but my main aim was to experiment and it turned out to be very easily customisable.