[TheForge] Re: OT - Video Camera ?

[Mike Spencer]

Ben> If you have a laptop available, or computer nearby, you could try
Ben> http://www.zoneminder.com/

Yes.  I've tried to get zoneminder set up with a nice Sony security
video cam and a TV-Wonder card.  Ran into problems with the camera
control interface that I haven't yet untangled.  It has a lot of
configure features and options including a HTTP-based control
interface and MySQL image management.  But it promises quite a lot.  I
think (?) you could use it with a cheap, 2nd hand web cam.

There is also a program (for Linux, dunno about Windows) called motion
[1].  It's way less sophisticated than zoneminder but does let you set
how much motion -- i.e. changes between the present frame and a
reference frame -- to ignore before saving frames.  E.g., you can tell
it that cars passing on the street in the background aren't "motion"
while people in the room *are* "motion".  I've had it running on a PII
with a Logitech Quickcam webcam, sending frames back to my main box in
the house from the shop by wireless.  If it were set to ignore the
amount of motion represented by your working linkage, it might then
detect and report (by capturing time-stamped image frames) the time
that the linkage failed.  A script could watch the destination
directory and sound an audible alarm [2] when image files begin to
appear in the directory.


- Mike

[1] http://www.lavrsen.dk/twiki/bin/view/Motion/WebHome

[2] I have recordings of a hammer-on-anvil blow and of a barred owl
    that play when an audible alarm is needed.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^