So yesterday I decided I wanted to play a bit with my old webcam. So I went trough the “HOWTO install a webcam” on the Gentoo WIKI and managed to get my Philips SPC 200NC running without much trouble. Only issue I’m currently having is that the image is flipped upside down….but I easily solved that by simply turning the cam upside down :p

Now that I have the cam up and running, I’m currently making a Timelapse video of a candle. Not the most exciting i know, but I just want it to be set up right before I aim it out on the street outside. I was planning on making a time lapse video of what’s going on outside my window.

Here’s what 60 pictures with 1 picture a min looks like in timelapse:

I also really want to set up some kind of sensor system, so that it detects and takes a picture each time there is movement in the cameras viewpoint, but we’ll see how that goes. From what I’ve read it requires a bit of work to get it going.

I might also have the application I’m currently using to grab images (camorama) to upload the images it takes on to my server, and host a crude kind of webcam. Either that, or run VLC and have it run an XviD or mpeg4 encoded stream trough rtsp or http. We’ll see, depends on whether or not I want you guys to peak on my private life all the time or not ;)

And by the way, I know webcams are sooooo 1998, but It’s so much fun! So bah on you all :p

EDIT:
Okay so here’s my published webcam. It updates every minute (which might be a bit too often to be honest, but we’ll see) and will probably be running all the time. You have to updated manually though, as I can’t be bothered setting up a javascript to refresh it.

EDIT 2:
I checked up on the possibility of taking a time lapse out the window, but it seems my camera has great difficulty actually “seeing” anything outside, so it’s staying in for now.

I have also set up a new domain on http://webcam.jumpingmushroom.com where there’s a javascript updating the image every X second (it will be a set second as soon as I know what upload frequency i should set it to :p), and I also pimped the image a bit with info about what music I’m currently playing :D