Finally: Webcam working

On the PC in my office, there was a problem with prohibited for a long while the setting up of a web cam, but now I finally got around to fid this problem. The web cam is installed and provides pictures every minute. The latest one is here:



About a year ago, I did run a web cam from my laptop, using a software EasyFreeWebCam. Never mind the slightly sleaze applications being advertised for use of this software... I had done a few comparisons, and this software seemed to provide the most customisations. I wanted to set up the software to automatically upload a captured picture onto our web server. However, for some reason this did not work on my office PC but only on my laptop computer. A while I had this running on the laptop, but then I needed the laptop for other purposes, and I wanted to run the webcam also over night.

Today I finally came to revisit this problem. I tried a couple of other capture software packages - none of them worked with the specific situation on my PC. No idea what the problem is. WS_FTP works fine, I can access the web server from this PC. But none of the automatic ftp uploads worked, although the firewall was configured with exceptions to allow uploads.

So what I did today: I wrote a small software in good old MS Visual Studio 6.0, using MFC, for timer-triggered upload of a file onto an ftp server. Works just excellent! The video capture software captures an image every minute and stores it locally. Then my software runs constantly and uploads this file every minute to the ftp server. From there, the web page is configured to reload and show the image every minute, so that always the lastest captured image is shown. There is an inherent potential maximum delay of 2 minutes - but this does not really matter.

The website with the live update also has a Google map on it - I will keep experimenting a bit with it, related to other projects that I am currently working on.