O'Connell 136 Lab Cam

O'Connell 136 Lab Cam


This picture was taken from the security camera in O'Connell 136, it is updated every minute.

The system I used is set up exactly like Chris Trown(ctrown)'s Butte Cam. The current machine is a Mac II with an ethernet card and a Video Spigot card. The mac is actually a little broken, the keyboard/mouse interface doesn't function, which made for an interesting installation and configuration. The mac is running Timed Video Grabber which saves a jpeg evey minute. Thanks to NetPresenz, which acts as an FTP server, the web server is able to FTP the image at one minute intervals.

History:

The Macintosh I origionally used was a Quadra 700, which Adam Bertsch(spock) helped me set up. The fact that a powerful(at the time) machine was being wasted on a web page eventually got to me, so I replaced the Quadra with the oldest machine that I could find that would still run the software. I had to do a lot of work to configure the ethernet card without a mouse or keyboard to change the settings, but that is a different story.

The Mac begain to freeze up every few days, sometimes because of a video grabber error, and other times just because. After a while, I installed a piece of metal on the side of the Mac that I could hit every morning, to reset the machine. School took me by surprise, and the Mac just sat frozen for a few months (but only one person noticed).

Now, after a complete OS reload, an upgrade of the networking software, and the addition of a program that reboots the machine every night, the labcam seems to be totally stable.

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